A capital raise and three sell-side mandates in market this autumn, and why coverage is earned before the first email.
Since the summer issue the desk has moved from preparation into execution, with four processes now live. The first is a capital raise for a sponsor-style buy-and-build in UK and European vertical software, consolidating founder-owned platforms where embedded payments remain under-monetised. Alongside it run three sell-side mandates: a vertical payment-orchestration platform in high-ticket remote commerce, with billions of euro in annualised TPV and retention in the high nineties; an open-banking infrastructure provider delivering PSD2 dedicated-interface compliance to banks and EMIs on multi-year contracts; and a stablecoin-settlement acquirer serving high-risk MCCs, where card acquiring is costly, restricted or unavailable.
The assets and the counterparty sets could hardly differ more, yet the discipline is the same. An M&A process is a sales process. Whether the reader is a strategic, a sponsor or an investor, the process stands or falls on whether they see their own reason to engage.
In an active market the temptation is breadth: release the teaser to five hundred names and call it coverage. A head of corporate development at a scaled acquirer or a network sees dozens of teasers a month, and one that leads with our client's growth rate reads like all the others.
Every counterparty is profiled before it is contacted. Each claim is sourced twice, and every profile carries a record of the last ninety days: announcements, senior hires, partnerships, regulatory filings. That record is where the approach originates. Referencing a partnership signed last month shows preparation; referencing a firm's "market-leading position" shows the opposite.
For each mandate we map every strategic, sponsor and, for the raise, investor, and nobody is crossed off. Each name gets a score for how likely they are to engage, with the reasons written down. Timing changes everything, and a name that scores low today can be the first call on the next deal.
The list is only as good as its clean-up. On one recent mandate it ran to almost four hundred names. Once we traced who actually owns whom, it came down to about two hundred and fifty. The same group had appeared three times: as the parent, as a subsidiary, and through the fund that backs it. Three separate approaches would have landed on the same desk, and that buyer would have drawn the obvious conclusion about how carefully we had prepared.
Only then do we define five to ten synergies, each tied to evidence: the buyer's documented priority, the specific capability on our side, the mechanism of value creation, the decision owner, and the most likely objection. Each is classified as acquire, partner or build. Often the honest conclusion is a commercial partnership rather than an acquisition, and saying so builds more credibility than forcing every conversation towards a bid. The assessment closes with the three strongest reasons the buyer might decline and five questions for the next conversation. It never asserts a product gap, a customer overlap, a financial benefit or an appetite to transact that the evidence does not support. Buyers underwrite cost synergies and discount revenue synergies, and they notice quickly when an adviser does not.
On a buy-side mandate, that means writing the seller's best case properly, including the comparables their banker will pick and why those flatter, and then letting the buyer's view have the last word. On the sell side, it is the same exercise pointed at our own client: where do the numbers look better than they are? Pipeline that has not closed is upside, not the plan. A take rate drifting down, partner revenue share eating into margin, a sales team that has quietly shrunk: a good buyer will find all of it in diligence. I would much rather we find it first and tell that story ourselves than have it found for us at the worst possible moment.
SBC Summit, Lisbon: 29 September to 1 October - Just finished it!
Fintech Meetup Europe, Lisbon (speaking): 6 to 8 October
Money20/20 USA, Las Vegas: 18 to 21 October
London: early November, and again in December
Chicago: week of 23 November, over Thanksgiving
If you are weighing a raise or an exit over the coming quarters, I would welcome a conversation, in person at any of the above or before the year-end break.
And — if you have read this far, consider it a quiet compliment. A few prior pieces that I think sit alongside today's thinking rather well:
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