Nowadays the banking business is most actively involved in the use of cloud technologies. The introduction of a virtual data room in the investment banking sector is a quick and effective way to reduce costs, improve the quality of service and data management.
What is investment banking?
In the segment of banking operations, investment banking occupies a separate niche. Investment banks are professional stock market participants who help other market participants to accumulate long-term financial resources and rationally allocate them and are reliable partners for both issuers and investors. Investment activities, in turn, are divided into:
- financial consulting (merger advice) and acquisitions, restructuring, separation of companies from parent companies);
- underwriting (public and private placement of equity instruments, securities, and their derivatives).
The main direction of investment banking is corporate financing: various companies receive investments in the form of loans that are used for internal and external development. Thanks to financial assistance, developing companies can survive in an atmosphere of fierce competition.
Another popular trend is the merger and acquisition (M&A) of one company by another. M&A is a rather complicated process, the success of which depends not only on the correctness of the chosen strategy but also on the professionalism of its execution. The investment bank accounts for the bulk of the work on the M&A deal. The investment bank organizes the entire transaction process and acts as a coordinator of all consultants involved in the work. As a rule, the investment bank represents the interests of one of the parties to the transaction.
Virtual data room for investment banking
In the corporate sector, cloud solutions are used to exchange information, electronic documents, interact with clients and contractors. Against the backdrop of general interest, data centers are promoting services for hosting corporate solutions on their computing sites, and integrator companies offer services for creating a private cloud, for example, virtual data room (VDR).
Understanding VDR as a specialized software solution that reflects and stores customer interactions is too narrow and quickly becomes outdated. Today, it is more of a business approach and a set of technical solutions that provide personalized actions at the customer level.
And now about the benefits that investment banks receive after the implementation of VDR:
- The first and most important question that arises when using cloud technologies is security. Leading banks prefer data rooms to ensure reliable protection of their customers’ data in a data warehouse. Security is ensured by mechanisms for delimiting access rights to documents, ensuring the integrity of the database, and building distributed systems. The use of a qualified electronic signature guarantees the immutability of documents after signing.
- Thanks to the web interface, all the necessary documents are available to employees and customers of the bank anytime and anywhere. The data room allows banks to exchange almost any kind of document with clients, without losing their legal significance. Due to the centralized processing of documents, the load on the bank’s client departments is reduced.
- The data room enables teams to work together on documents. Agreements, plans, and appointments can be communicated using a message and comment system.
What are the best data room solutions?
For those who want to take seriously the development of data accounting systems in investment banking, we have prepared a rating of the best VDR solutions:
- iDeals
- Ansarada
- Dealroom
- Merill
- Firmex
- Securedoxs
- Digify
- Drooms
- Intralinks
- Datasite
So, these VDRs combine well-known management technologies and software solutions that are used locally and solved the problems of separate departments and users.