Technological innovation is rapidly disrupting the traditional investment bank’s role and relevance in the deal making process. One company that has contributed significantly to this disruption is BankerBay, the world’s largest investment banking platform. The company is focused on replacing the time consuming and labour-intensive parts of the deal origination process with efficient, scientifically precise, and scalable solutions. Used by leading financial institutions across the globe, the platform is an efficient replacement and enhancement of the traditional deal origination process, connecting qualified corporate seekers of capital with institutional providers, worldwide. In a little less than four years, BankerBay has solidified its position as the largest investment banking platform with close to 27,000 registered members, over USD 250 billion in current live deals and USD 30 billion in new deals being submitted to the platform every month.
At the Helm
Romesh Jayawickrama, CEO and Founder of BankerBay, has over twenty years of investment banking experience. Having started his career in London, he later moved to Singapore where he spent several years working at traditional investment banks. After experiencing years of frustration with the lack of evolution at these big banks, he left to set up his own boutique advisory firm that focused on middle market companies requiring capital.
This background, both at the big banks and at his private boutique firm, led to the identification of a much bigger systemic problem in the industry. It was all dependent on human capital – a resource which was scaled back dramatically during the financial crisis. It also relied more on the strength of a personal network than the merits of the actual deal. Jayawickrama felt this time consuming and inefficient process was no longer acceptable, and certainly not necessary. Being a leader who believes in intelligently improving outmoded, laborious workflows with the help of technology, he established BankerBay to solve these problems.
A Truly Global Company
BankerBay was established to ensure that every single mid-market company in the world that needed capital, wherever they were based and regardless of who they knew, could have access to the most appropriate capital for their company based on merit and fundamentals.
With BankerBay, private equity funds and investment banks looking to invest in companies can access qualified deals from firms looking to raise capital for their business. This converts the manual, unscientific, slow and expensive deal origination process into a technology-driven, automated, scientifically precise, fast and cost effective one. BankerBay frees up the time of its users by reducing the work of hundreds of man-hours to a matter of minutes, and allowing them to focus their limited resources on deal closure rather than sourcing.
A Laborious Process Reduced to a Matter of Minutes
In just a few easy steps, BankerBay helps members raise capital, buy and sell companies, locate potential investments and new clients. BankerBay uses powerful, proprietary machine-learning algorithms and a team of expert analysts to match requirements entered by its members. BankerBay isn’t designed or meant to replace in-person meetings. It is a platform to better source information and opportunities, prior to committing valuable resources further.
BankerBay is the only platform that is curated, vetting every single new client and deal before they go live on the platform. It rejects approximately 30 percent of the deals submitted to the platform each month for a multitude of reasons, as the quality of deal flow is of utmost importance. BankerBay operates on a confidential no-name basis, only revealing contact details once both parties have chosen to be introduced.
Simplifying the Deal Sourcing Process
BankerBay currently has close to 27,000 registered members, with 1,000 new members being added each month. These include 134 of the Fortune 500, and some of the biggest global names in private equity and banking. BankerBay members have access to the largest platform of deals in the world – over USD 250 billion in live, curated deals today. BankerBay delivers a curated list of potential investment opportunities or sources of capital in not weeks or months, but minutes, allowing its users to deploy their human capital on higher value tasks up the chain. The rapid growth BankerBay has seen in terms of membership, as well as deal flow, is a testament to the fact that the industry has adopted BankerBay’s technology to simplify their deal sourcing requirements.
A Digital Transformation
The scope for a platform such as BankerBay is virtually limitless. New technologies have the potential to solve simple, repetitive or time consuming tasks. For instance, BankerBay makes use of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand investment mandates in order to match them to relevant qualified deals – all without expending human capital or time in the process. At BankerBay, the underlying belief is that challenges stem from how people use technology and not the technology itself.
Looking to the Future
BankerBay is constantly innovating and building towards excellence. The company’s ultimate goal is to transform the entire mid-market deal sourcing and execution space using BankerBay. This would mean that any participants involved in global mid-market deals would use BankerBay as their primary tool, supplemented by additional machine learning and predictive analytical products that will move the platform and our industry from descriptive analytics to predictive. The organization will be introducing blockchain features and the development of additional enterprise products in the near future.
