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Winner of the 'Best Fundraising Solution' Category at the 2024 Private Equity Wire European Awards

Please describe your firm’s service offering and what makes it special.  Intapp DealCloud is a deal and pipeline management solution built by industry professionals. It helps investor and advisory firms close more deals and generate higher returns by providing one centralised location for accessing and applying firm-wide intelligence. Unlike generic CRM systems, DealCloud enables firms to manage complex multi-directional relationships with ease.  

Why do clients choose Intapp DealCloud?

One reason is that DealCloud is built specifically to meet the unique needs of financial services firms. We have spent decades studying the industry and understand that firms interact with a wide range of individuals on every fund raise and capital deployment. We also understand that trusted relationships are everything.

DealCloud helps professionals work more effectively, accelerate deal closings and strengthen relationships by allowing them to map, manage and nurture all their connections within one platform.

Another reason firms choose DealCloud is because they’re able to take advantage of best practices we’ve developed from serving more than 2,400 clients. These best practices are incorporated into “blueprints” tailored for private equity, private credit, venture capital and other types of private capital. These blueprints, which include a pre-configured site structure, reports and workflows, enable many firms to go from signature to production in just weeks.

Private equity firms also choose DealCloud because it offers Applied AI features that help them improve critical processes and decision-making while respecting their data access models. For example, our zero-entry feature uses AI to automatically capture data. This eliminates tedious manual work so professionals can focus more time on strategic priorities. An AI-generated relationship intelligence feed also provides insights that help professionals make informed decisions.

How do your clients take advantage of your technology? Our clients use DealCloud to manage and improve just about every aspect of their businesses. The most common use cases include:  

• Business development — Because institutional knowledge is centralised in the DealCloud platform, firms can accelerate their business development efforts with insights into client investment preferences, their professionals’ expertise and deals pitched, won and lost. 
• Deal sourcing — Clients uncover new business opportunities with AI-driven recommendations generated using proprietary data and integrated third-party intelligence. 
• Relationship management — Clients gain a first-mover advantage leveraging network updates, follow-up nudges and actionable information from DealCloud’s AI-powered relationship intelligence feed. They also identify the strongest potential paths of introduction to new contacts using AI-driven relationship scoring that identifies existing internal relationships.  
• Pipeline management — Firms accelerate deal execution with DealCloud’s automated task workflows, alerts and customisable pipeline activity reports. 
• Email marketing — Our email marketing tool, Dispatch, saves clients time with AI-assisted email generation.  

Our clients also use our mobile app, telling us it saves them time because they can quickly view data and deal progress while on the road. For example, if they’re headed to a conference, they can get tear sheets and see real-time activity for companies they’re meeting with while on the plane or in a taxi. 

What are your most noteworthy product or service innovations from the past 12 months?  Our most noteworthy innovations from the past 12 months include:  

• AI-powered relationship management functionality — Intapp Assist for DealCloud, our generative AI offering, delivers insights and time savings that provide firms with a competitive advantage. These features include the relationship intelligence feed we mentioned earlier and contextual email outreach. Contextual email outreach makes it faster and easier for professionals to nurture relationships by automatically generating engaging email content informed by a firm’s history with a contact, relationship intelligence and relevant news.
• Advanced collaboration capabilities — Firms can automatically provision, govern and maintain deal-specific workspaces in Microsoft 365 — right from DealCloud.  These secure workspaces accelerate deal execution by allowing professionals to share information and collaborate within one convenient location. Integration between DealCloud and Microsoft 365 also allows users to view DealCloud dashboards from within Microsoft Teams and include actions related to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint in DealCloud workflows.
• Enhanced Microsoft Outlook integration — We’ve made several enhancements to our DealCloud Microsoft Outlook add-in that save professionals time. The add-in, which integrates emails, events and attachments with DealCloud data, now allows professionals to search, add and edit DealCloud entries directly from Outlook. For instance, professionals can run engagement summaries and email them to clients — or view pipeline data before sending a team update — without ever leaving Outlook.
• Document ingestion service — This service allows commercial real estate firms using DealCloud to improve productivity while ensuring data integrity. It automatically extracts key data from offering memorandums or investment memorandums, which is then reviewed by human eyes for accuracy. Once the data has been validated, it can be integrated with other information or used to build proprietary data sets that inform decisions on real asset deals.  

What are the most significant changes you’ve observed in the European private markets industry in the past 12 months?​ One is an increased focus on environmental, social and governance considerations. Rising concerns about climate change, social disparities and corporate governance — coupled with regulations and societal expectations that prioritise sustainability — are fuelling growing interest in ESG-friendly investments.  As a result, potential investments in European private markets are increasingly assessed on ESG-related factors as well as their financial performance. In addition, private equity firms with a demonstrable commitment to sustainability can secure capital and deals more easily. This puts pressure on them to improve ESG performance and embrace more sustainable investing approaches. Firms that use solutions like Intapp DealCloud have an advantage when it comes to executing ESG investment strategies. For one, they provide the advanced analytics and reporting firms need to prioritise investment opportunities based on ESG criteria. By consolidating ESG data in one platform, they allow firms to monitor ESG performance across portfolio companies and identify areas for improvement. Another significant change is the surge in secondary market activity. Many investors want to unlock capital from illiquid assets that have dropped in value due to economic conditions. This is driving a massive increase in the formation of secondary funds comprising assets purchased from cash-strapped investors. Firms interested in secondary funds can benefit greatly from solutions such as DealCloud that provide capabilities for managing the secondaries pipeline and tracking investment preferences. 

Amit Lalwani, Vice President, Global Head of Sales & Account Management, Financial Services, Intapp – 
Amit Lalwani is the Vice President of Financial Services at Intapp, where he focuses on driving business development efforts globally to provide a unified deal management and compliance platform to investment banking clients. He has hired, managed and led multiple teams globally across engineering, market research, project management and professional services to deliver enterprise software solutions for financial firms. Amit received both a BA in business management and an MS in information systems and corporate finance from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.