The world being increasingly digital requires no debate, but an important extension is that most areas of life are more digitised than ever before. The exponential availability of live and historic data concerning both on- and offline behaviours and commercials presents clear opportunities to evaluate businesses beyond digital pure plays.
While there are challenges in building the capability and tools to gather, clean, triangulate, and interpret the datasets which are most pertinent to an investment, successfully applying digitised data brings the following advantages to a tech-enabled, commercial diligence exercise.
1. Significantly Reduced Latency
With collection methodologies on data gathering and subsequent access streamlined by technology, the turnaround time on a CDD project that leverages digitised data is measured in weeks rather than months, with data periods that can be as recent as previous day.
2. Accuracy and Robustness
The scale of digitised datasets allows for samples that exceed traditional methodologies. A round of even 100 customer interviews, while an undeniably useful tool, introduces more volatility than thousands of feedback points across social media, forums, reviews and more. Likewise with tens of thousands of search terms in a sector. Big datasets allow for segmentation by geography, subcategory, topic or sentiment with a robust sample for each cut. In addition, the speed at which multiple datasets can be triangulated allows for ongoing validation and anomaly spotting.
3. More, earlier from outside-in
With the best datasets allowing like-for-like comparison amongst competitors, with no access to internal teams or sell-side materials, they can service any stage of the deal process. From origination and pre-approach market mapping, through to commercial diligence. Because the majority are global in scope (but with granular breakouts), the ability to conduct either global analysis, or country-level comparisons versus local competitors is a strong benefit.
4. Availability (no wait time)
Because the majority of datasets are passively collected over time, they are available for extraction at short notice, allowing projects to kick-off and analysis to begin immediately and with years of historical comparison. The one-week check-in call for a tech-enabled diligence project already includes meaningful topline analysis and red flag report on the majority of evaluation areas.
5. Global and hyper-local
The majority of onefourzero’s datasets are collected with daily granularity, meaning they can be quickly aggregated into monthly or quarterly periods to align with other areas of work for comparison or modelling inputs. This flexibility, coupled with the ability to segment by geographies and combine with a broad range of available datasets (from revenues and commercials to mobile-tracked footfall) allows tailoring of outputs to answer both broad and nuanced diligence questions.
Digitised data means more accurate commercial diligence, and allows assessment of multichannel, multi vertical assets.
