Introduction

We are CIRTO. I work in CIRTO as a product manager and we do financial intelligence.

I don't want to tell you what we mean by that. I want to show you what we mean by that.

A real M&A scouting scenario

So let's suppose I'm a strategic consultant specializing in M &A. That means I help companies acquire other companies.

And there is Walter. Walter owns Cremoso SRL, which is a small company in Naples producing coffee. They're doing well, it's a healthy company, and they want to expand geographically.

So they want to go towards the center of Italy and have a slice of the market there. So Walter comes to me and said, listen, this is not my job. I want you to help me find some good target, some good target company already producing coffee in the center of Italy and see if we can find an agreement because I want to buy them.

Starting from the buyer profile in CIRTO

So what I do is I go to Sirto and I start typing the name of the company of Walter, Cremoso, and I find it. Okay, it's good. Yeah, it's a bit small on the screen here, but okay.

Visualizing health and growth with the efficiency–size trajectory

the first thing i see is a trajectory on a plot the plot is based on proprietary data we have built based on machine learning and we call them efficiency and size so in one shot i already see that cremoso is a good company and it's healthy why i can understand this because every point

is a year in time back in time so I see that over time cremoso has grown both in efficiency and size so now in 10 seconds without looking at any number I already know it's a good company in its healthy what I can then do is go and deep dive

Company profile essentials: ownership, management, and products

into different type of information about cremoso so I see a description it's based in Naples company produces and sells coffee and etc I can see who is the owner and hopefully yeah that's water and I can see what are the other managers and I see there's a CEO called Enrico Vezzio and it is a family -owned

business I can also see product overview so every product they have what they do and the description for each of it yeah so basically in another 10 seconds I know a lot of things about this company right which would have taken much more

Financial statement deep dive

time to understand if I want to deep dive in the financial though because we are financial intelligence right I can go and see every financial statements of last years of the company and I can check every number because I'm an expert

so I can deep dive and do whatever the analysis I want to do now Walter came to me not because he wanted me to understand his company he wanted me to

Finding acquisition targets with Scouting

find targets right so let's do that I go to scouting and here with just one click I can find all the companies with a similar value proposition so a similar description of what they do and sell then he it told me to find look for companies of the same size and only in the center of Italy so with a few clicks

I can do that. And I want also to add another filter.

I want to check only companies with a net financial position that is less than zero, which means there are good companies with a lot of cash. so I can confirm and what I find is you can see in few seconds a lot of companies producing coffee in the center of Italy with a net financial position that is negative now I select all of them I create a list and all right now

you can see I have all of these companies on the radar and I can compare compare these companies, which we can call a market now, this is the market of coffee producers in the center of Italy, and I can see that most of them are performing worse than Cremoso, which can be good or bad, it depends, it's not enough, right?

Benchmarking the market using EBITDA metrics

So now I want to do one thing, I want to check about another financial index, which is based on EBITDA okay sorry if I go fast but we don't have time to explain everything so what I want to do now is to see what is the average EBITDA of these companies

all of them so I just go and in the comparison tab I can select all the scouting lists and see in few seconds the average values of these companies so

So if we check the last two rows, we can see that the EBITDA margin is, on average, 11%. And the EBITDA CAGR, which is another important index, is 13%. Now, how can I use this information?

Applying thresholds to highlight above-average targets

I want to add some thresholds to give a color to each point, so to each company, and see what are their situations based on these thresholds. So I'm going to do it fast, and I want to add a threshold on, we said, KGAR, EBITDA KGAR. So I want them to be green if their value is above the average we've seen, right? So I want to see them green if the KGAR value is above, I think it was 13%, right?

And also, I want to add another filter on the EBITDA margin. so margin in this case I want to depict on green those that are above the average again so 11 % okay so now I just need to activate the color layer and there you go so we see in one shot that we have some companies that perform

above average on both the indices and those are the green ones so now we are six minutes in the demo and I already have four five because one probably is the company itself yeah so we have another five green companies that are already nice potential targets for cremosa and for Walter this kind of of analysis would have taken hours if I'm really proficient but

Turning a shortlist into an actionable report

probably days to be done so what I have now I have just a list but I want something actionable I want something to give to the to Walter I want something to discuss on so let's say let's see this company this company is called Nikolai, it's in Pistoia, yeah, Tuscany, okay.

Rose blends supplies coffee, yeah, so everything is is right.

Selecting a target and generating a PowerPoint

So with one click now I want to create a report. I want to use this to go and discuss with Walter.

So I just give a name to the report, report, and I can also ask for some specific analysis to be included in this report.

So let's say I want something, some deep dive on liquidity, liquidity analysis so and then I can also add some other indices and so on and I select PowerPoint because yeah I'm happy that the system does 15 page report automatically but I want to customize it right so I just click on create report

and wait a few minutes what I will have is is a PowerPoint with all the information and all the analysis is not just about data is about the analysis and comprehension of the company that I can go there you go and discuss with

with Walter so let's see okay I will just go through really really fast you see an executive summary then we have an anagraphic description that we have seen already there is some performance overview da da da da da da so I can understand better detailed analysis so much more text based slide where there's

all the description and then there's also the custom section I asked for liquidity analysis and there you go I have a liquidity analysis of this company so this is the base to go back to water and discuss about this target

does he like it or not we'll see now we are nine minutes in the demo again what

Key takeaways: speed, ease, and depth

What I want to stress now is that it's not only about speed and easiness of all the process, but it's about deepness.

We didn't just put a lot of data together. We connected the dots. We created much more information.

There's a really profound layer of knowledge that you can use for your job.

Conclusion

CIRTO AI as a faster access layer

And last but not least, once you are very proficient or once you have to discuss something very fast with your CEO, with your C -level and manager, now we have

another way of accessing all this data that is called CIRTO AI. So I don't want to show it, but it's just, you know, basically you connect to your chatbot, this cloud that is co -pilot, it's ChatGPT, and you give it access to all the data

and knowledge and tools we have in CIRTO so the chatbot knows you knows you well knows your company knows your needs and it just exploits CIRTO to reach your goals much much faster thank you