Longlists and Valuations Built on a Reliable Data Foundation

WTS Advisory's M&A team supports mid-sized companies in transactions on both the sell- and buy-side. This includes researching potential buyers, company valuations (mostly on a multiples basis), and market and competitive analyses.

The bottleneck was rarely the analysis itself, but the sourcing. Before using StrategyBridgeAI, most research relied on traditional databases, registry data, Google, and manual compilation. For every longlist, companies had to be identified, websites checked, financial data researched, and results validated. This is especially difficult where the team works most often: with mid-sized private companies that publish little but are often the relevant candidates.

Today, WTS Advisory uses StrategyBridgeAI both in acquisition and in ongoing mandates. The platform is used particularly often for:

Longlists are now reliable in significantly less time, with broader coverage than before. For multiple-based valuations the effect is comparable, with manual research effort clearly reduced.

In the SME segment, the platform complements and partly replaces the previously used sources: the team finds more embedded multiples than in its previous databases, particularly for multiples and comparable data. On top of that, roles, contacts and contact details are included, which makes the later process up to outreach easier.

One limit remains structural: where transactions stay private and confidential, the data is thin. No database fully solves this, and in this segment the team continues to work with that constraint.

From the team's perspective, the next sensible step is the evolution from a database toward a collaborative M&A platform on which several team members work together on the same research. In WTS Advisory's experience, feedback of this kind has so far fed into the platform's ongoing development.