Our CTO was brought in to help this company with a full scale technical due diligence prior, with the hope of a future aquisition.

Company Profile

The company, renowned for its advanced KYC services, catered to major banks and businesses working with high-net-worth individuals. With over fifteen years in the industry, they had established teams in both Basingstoke and Sofia, Bulgaria.

CEO’s Mission

The CEO, backed by the company’s shareholders, embarked on a mission to find a suitable buyer for the company. Past attempts to sell faltered due to inadequate investment in technology. This resulted in a cluttered core platform, escalating support overheads, and increasing customer attrition.

Being from a sales background, the newly appointed CEO recognised the importance of technical due diligence for an efficient business sale. He assembled a team of senior experts, including a CFO and a CTO, to streamline the business and prime it for acquisition.

CTO’s Objectives

  • Assess the current state of the team, products, and systems.
  • Establish budgets and scrutinize existing IT expenditure against the proposed roadmap.
  • Ready the company for CTO-led business evaluation and inbound technical due diligence from potential buyers.

What the CTO Did

Team Evaluation, Recruitment, and Management

In collaboration with the COO, the CTO optimised team deployment, ensuring roles were filled with the best talent while adhering to budget constraints. This fractional leadership in M&A approach was pivotal, especially in the challenging environment of a company poised for acquisition.

Software and Infrastructure Evaluation and Resolution

The task at hand was to declutter the tangled IT infrastructure. The setup, spread across expensive data centers, had many inefficiencies. Conflicting processes competed for resources, causing inconsistent performance. Both an inexperienced DevOps team and tight budgets contributed to this issue.

The CTO delved deep into the software’s quality and performance issues. Then, poor code was revamped, and in certain instances, the CTO provided hands-on guidance at the code level to ensure issues were identified and rectified.

Furthermore, the CEO sought the CTO’s expertise in conceptualizing a new product for advanced-stage clients. This involved crafting a plan, designing the architecture, and supervising the build and delivery of the solution.

Business as Usual Support

During this transformative phase, the CTO played a pivotal role in technical assessment for M&A, aiding the business with technical presales for clients seeking specific systems or integrations.

Moreover, the CTO conducted external evaluations for major banking clients to manage their data with utmost precision. He demonstrated the security of desktop systems against data breaches and meticulously managed data center access, highlighting the importance of a thorough business sale technical review.

The Results

  • The in-house team were augmented with a more experienced and cost-effective team from Poland who were partly co-located. This smoothed the delivery of the product and ensured that support was more timely and better coordinated. 
  • The end result was that the company was much healthier in terms of their technology product and there was a significant reduction in issues faced by clients
  • The business was sold  for 11 times its valuation from the previous attempt. 
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