Dealmaking activity across corporate and investment banking continues to surge. Deal volumes worldwide reached an all-time record of $2.8 trillion globally through the first six months of 2021 — a 29% year-over-year increase — according to Refinitiv.

Deal volumes have not only accelerated but the timelines for completing transactions have also rapidly compressed for a host of reasons:

• Corporate war chests are flush with cash, and strategic buyers are fast-tracking acquisitions and divestitures to gain scale and growth
  
• Private equity funds and family offices have enormous amounts of dry powder to deploy, and direct lenders in the middle market are eager to put funds to work
  
• Baby boomer business owners are actively seeking liquidity events after potential deals struck in 2020 were postponed due to pandemic-related economic uncertainty
  
• Special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) funding volumes have skyrocketed
• The potential for higher capital gains tax rates are causing some business owners to accelerate their exit timelines

Put it all together, and you get dealmaking occurring at an incredible pace. This has put immense pressure on an industry that is already strained from long-simmering operational inefficiency.

Transactions that typically took months to close are now being completed within a matter of weeks. Traditional legacy systems are ill-equipped to manage these fast-paced, complex transactions in the new “work from anywhere” environment. These disjointed systems harbor siloed channels of information, inhibiting bankers’ ability to find, share, and analyze the information needed to guide decision-making in a rapidly evolving landscape. Moreover, they fail to incorporate the predictive power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to uncover hidden patterns and relationships, gain crucial insights, and create a competitive edge.

Fortunately, technologies have emerged that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable deal teams to make better, faster, and more profitable decisions by connecting secure workflows across every client touchpoint. These next-generation platforms are built for operational agility and offer an unprecedented advantage when it comes to winning more mandates, managing deal pipelines, getting compliance approval, managing conflicts of interest, and getting deals done faster.

Salesforce asked deal teams in M&A, capital raising, and corporate restructuring across the corporate and investment banking industries about the unique challenges they face today. Drawing on these conversations and our strengths as the leader in customer relationship management, Salesforce developed Corporate and Investment Banking for Financial Services Cloud. Our platform can help bankers develop a digital-first framework by leveraging in-house and third-party data to uncover new opportunities, streamline operations, and strengthen your team’s agility.

The cloud-based platform is purpose-built for the needs of corporate and investment bankers. It combines a scalable framework that is designed specifically for M&A advisory and capital-raising while providing flexibility to adapt to the nuances of your team’s workflows and target markets.

Our platform is designed according to the stringent regulatory requirements of the corporate and investment banking industry. This allows deal teams to efficiently and compliantly share knowledge and manage prospects, clients, targets, and partners across the pitch and transaction lifecycle. Bankers can source new deal opportunities with a fuller, richer understanding of clients—from their growth trajectories to their need for capital and strategic partnerships. Once the mandate is won, a 360-degree view of complex information, structures, and relationships allows bankers to predict behavior and uncover unique insights about market dynamics — all while navigating the industry’s compliance restrictions.

Salesforce’s Corporate and Investment Banking for Financial Services Cloud fuels productivity for every member of the deal team and makes it easy to build and execute a timely, efficient, and compliant service-delivery model. This allows dealmakers to focus on what they do best: generating, building, and nurturing client relationships.

Find out how Salesforce’s Corporate and Investment Banking for Financial Services Cloud can empower your team and streamline every aspect of the deal-making process, from identification to pitching to execution. We explain how our purpose-built new solution can help bankers and deal teams:

• Increase idea generation for clients, accelerate pitch preparation, win more mandates, and drive more value for clients
  
• Uncover actionable insights through industry-specific predictive analytics
  
• Enable smarter pipeline nurturing through an extended 360-degree view of interconnected relationships and permission-based sharing of insights and interactions
  
• Reduce risk and simplify compliance processes
  
• Empower productivity across the deal lifecycle