Three ways a data clean room can help you realize M&A synergies faster

In this record-setting M&A market, every dealmaker scrutinizes data, but few take full advantage of the time between deal sign and close.

In brief

• Boards and c-suites can accelerate M&A synergy capture by months with a clean room augmented by third-party experience.
• Tools allowing for deep data analysis, in a clean room structure, can expand merger and acquisition synergies.

Buyers and targets can use a clean room to share information, unlock synergy potential closer to Day One and hit the ground running during M&A integration. Clean room teams can swiftly build a harmonized view of the risks and value drivers in combining two disparate businesses by exchanging sensitive data within antitrust and confidentiality guidelines.

Three main benefits to using an M&A deal clean room

1. Accelerated synergy timeline

Realized synergy value over 24 months can be accelerated by at least 90 days with a clean room, in our experience. Companies that deploy an M&A synergies clean room two to three months before close can build an aligned view of the combined business products, customers, vendors and supply chains sooner in order to quickly uncover hidden value, reveal operational opportunities, identify cross-functional dependencies and assess supply chain resilience.

2. Bigger synergy opportunities, with greater confidence

Advanced data mining, data analysis and visualization tools used in a clean room inject more quantitative rigor to synergy identification. These tools test top-down deal thesis numbers that are based on P&L information and industry comparisons. And they challenge entrenched thinking and uncover trends hidden in the data.

A clean team has access to a rich set of supplier, customer, product and other data that can be analyzed to isolate the commercial and operational pockets of the business with the largest synergy impact and estimate the revenue and cost synergies in the go-forward business.

3. Objective synergy opinions

Boards tend to discount stated synergies out of concern that the acquirer doesn’t have a full picture of its target. A clean-room structure with a third party provides an objective view of deal-specific synergies grounded in the advisors’ sector expertise, data from years of advising on deals and early access to critical data sets from both entities.