This story appears in the
December 2000 issue of
Entrepreneur.
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After years of feasting on corporate America's desire for
mergers and acquisitions, many financial Web sites are offering
M&A services to entrepreneurs.
CapitalKey Advisors Inc. has formed partnerships with Merrill
Lynch & Co. and FleetBoston Financial to take over M&A
deals that the financial giants couldn't afford to handle.
"It's hard to make money on very small transactions,"
says Neal Goldman, a CapitalKey founder and managing partner.
CapitalKey hopes to profit as a go-between for business owners
and investors by squeezing cost out of the M&A process. The
company collects and packages information that investors need-and
uses technology to reduce costs.
Goldman's job got a little easier when the Electronic
Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act became law. Now,
CapitalKey can have investors electronically sign confidentiality
agreements, speeding dissemination of deal info.
And the trend is likely to grow, as banks warm to CapitalKey
steering business their way. "[M&A is] attractive [for
banks] in that it's an additional way to cross-sell their
services to their existing customer base," says Joe Morford, a
San Francisco financial services analyst at Dain Rauscher Wessels,
a full-service securities firm. That bodes well for partnering with
major banks. Now the only question is, Are you ready to sell?
Freelance writer Chris Sandlund is a former editor of
Success and Home Office Computing magazines.
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