A Tech Company Aligns Investor Relations, M&A and Finance Workflows to Drive Transformation

THE CLIENT: A global, large-cap hardware and software tech equipment manufacturer.

USERS: Various team members across the corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), investor relations (IR) and finance teams. 

Companies need to address growth opportunities swiftly yet comprehensively, crafting corporate strategy through analysis across all departments. Common workflows include tracking competitors, monitoring market discussions about peers, conducting company valuations and capital planning activities, all requiring a single source of truth for financial data and strategic planning.  

In today's volatile hardware technology market, the client needed to achieve new strategic imperatives, including a shift from hardware-focused to software-enhanced offerings, capturing growth in new markets, expand margins resilience amid macroeconomic volatility and a supply chain shift. At the same time, they needed to maintain strong investor confidence during this transformation.  

The client needed to align messaging across C-suite, IR, finance and strategy teams.  After initially accessing Issuer Solutions through a basic post-IPO subscription, their need for additional seats revealed opportunities to streamline workflows and enhance cross-team collaboration.   

Pain Points

The client needed several data solutions that work well together, solve their need for quicker analysis and more automation, and provide access to comprehensive financial forecasting, outlooks, consensus analysis, and equity analyst research.    

• Manual Data Collection: Investor relations and corporate development spent excessive time gathering market, peer, and target news from varied sources with inconsistent methodologies. This inefficient, error-prone process hindered focus on high-value analysis. They needed quick, accurate data solutions offering deep insights and differentiation. 

• Tedious Corporate Office Workflows: Investor Relations, Finance, M&A, and Corporate Strategy teams relied on static Excel sheets without automation, repeatedly performing tasks for quarterly financial refreshes. This bottleneck slowed information delivery and responsiveness to market changes and investor inquiries. 

• Building Reporting Across Teams: Investor Relations, Finance, M&A, and Corporate Strategy teams relied on static Excel sheets without automation, repeatedly performing tasks for quarterly financial refreshes. This bottleneck slowed information delivery and responsiveness to market changes and investor inquiries. 

• Long Time-to-Insight for Estimates: Manual compilation of analyst estimates into spreadsheets delayed critical market expectations. The team required more granular, industry-specific data and deeper analysis with peer performance outlooks for timely decisions. 

• Inefficient Peer and Target Monitoring: Teams struggled to efficiently pull financials for industry, peer groups, and targets, making competitive analysis cumbersome. Faster access to comparable company lists became essential for market awareness and strategic opportunities. 

• Financial Modeling in Need of Modern Touches: Finance, M&A, and Strategy lacked integrated modeling tools to reduce time spent on financial documents. They needed comprehensive analyst research to add qualitative context for sophisticated modeling beyond basic Excel. 

The team contacted S&P Global Market Intelligence ("Market Intelligence") to learn more about the firm's offerings. 

The Solution

The client was happy to find an expanded ecosystem of granular data solutions for their teams. The end-to-end nature of coverage for investor relations was especially useful for simplifying the reporting process, improving research methods, and tying together corporate decision making across the corporate offices. AI-powered tools also helped to streamline their daily work, pave the way for faster peak-time quarterly analysis and reporting and access robust analytics and deep data resources only available from S&P Global.