Customer story
Harnessing tech solutions:
How Inflexion Differentiates Themselves Through Advanced Technology
Inflexion is a leading private equity firm based in London with a team of over 160 professionals – one of the mid-market’s most sizable teams. They distinguish themselves by closely collaborating with the businesses they back, providing both capital and expertise to drive accelerated growth. Inflexion boasts £8 billion in assets under management, with a portfolio reaching 160 countries across the globe.
As a firm who stands at the forefront of technology, Inflexion recognizes the pivotal role digital solutions play in driving operational efficiency – not only within their portfolio companies, but within their own firm.
Before procuring Gain, the team at Inflexion leveraged other intelligence platforms, but they lacked comprehensive coverage on European sponsor-backed businesses within their addressable asset pool. Because of this, their research teams had to spend hours on manual research and analysis of their sweet spot targets. Knowing they needed to create efficiency in this area, they sought out a platform that was not only comprehensive in its coverage, but digitally advanced in its functionalities.
“We spent a lot of time appraising multiple different platforms not just for origination and company identification, but also for tracking financials, news, fundraising history and ownership, among other metrics.”
Benjy Mason
In pursuit of a platform that fit their specific use cases and investment targets, they landed on Gain. They were immediately drawn to the platform’s in-depth information and data that was presented in a “very intuitive and clean UX/UI.” - Benjy Mason
Leveraging Gain within the investment team
After procuring Gain, the team at Inflexion was immediately able to integrate the tool into their daily workflows.
“I had a half hour call with our customer success manager and once I was comfortable and familiar with the features, I was up and running pretty much straight away.”
Benjy Mason
They were quickly able to leverage Gain to create efficiencies in a number of different areas of their origination funnel, including their company research, market analysis and opportunity tracking.
Speeding up company research
One of the primary ways Inflexion leverages Gain is to create efficiency in their company research. Gain’s in-depth company profiles provide a detailed snapshot of a company, including:
Concise business description
Cleaned financials
Business assessments
Market positioning
Ownership history
"With Gain, you can quickly search for a business and develop a thorough understanding of it. It's very useful to gain a comprehensive snapshot.”
Benjy Mason
For Inflexion, one of Gain’s key strengths is in the quality and reliability of our data. While we leverage AI technology to provide deep coverage on a broad scope of companies, our teams of analysts contribute with their expert evaluations and nuanced understanding of their local markets.
“One thing that’s really appealing about Gain is the analyst overlay that's provided. Oftentimes, Gain gives estimates based on proprietary intelligence or market rumor that wouldn't get captured in other platforms. That's really helpful. It also means someone's been through and sense-checked the data.”
Benjy Mason
Streamlining market analysis
When seeking out a private market intelligence platform, Inflexion wanted more than just a database, but a tool that would help them conduct thorough market analyses. “We want to make sure that the data is easy to interrogate because we love analysis and being able to manipulate and interrogate data. Gain is well set up for that.” - Benjy Mason
The ability to pull up a detailed graph of deals and companies and subsequently filter based on sector, country and growth profile stands out as a valuable feature. This functionality is "very useful" in their day-to-day operations as it allows them to navigate and manipulate data without ever having to leave the platform.
Furthermore, Gain plays a crucial role in portfolio analysis, offering a streamlined approach to assess sponsors and their activities.
“Gain is great for portfolio analysis. You can filter for sponsors and have a quick look at what they have been doing and you can filter for their deals and their portfolio with one click.”
Benjy Mason
Tracking investment opportunities
Within their origination funnel, the investment team at Inflexion leverages Gain’s advanced search functionality to gain visibility on their addressable asset pool.
“Many of the larger targets in our investable universe are likely to have had some previous sponsor backing, and the platform allows us to overlay our own specific criteria to this landscape in a streamlined workflow.”
Benjy Mason
Gain’s data is structured in such a way that makes it easy to search for companies using specific metrics, like financials or tags. Even better, users can save these filters as Bookmarks to help them proactively track companies within their sweet spot on an ongoing basis.
“I find Bookmarks quite useful. If a new business enters your specified scale bracket, you get an automated email saying that a new company now fits your criteria.”
Benjy Mason
Bookmarks provide the perfect environment to not only track the companies within your investment criteria, but to analyze them using interactive graphs. You can also discover similar companies to the ones in your Bookmarks, helping you identify other players in the market or potential add-on opportunities.
The impact of using Gain
Since adopting Gain, Inflexion has seen a substantial increase in efficiency.
“The biggest benefit from using Gain is time savings. When we do screening exercises or research on individual companies, with such a simple and intuitive user interface and workflow, Gain makes it very easy to carry out analysis.”
Benjy Mason
These efficiency gains translate into time savings, allowing Inflexion to expedite their analytical processes without compromising on the depth and accuracy of their assessments. This time savings means they are able to focus on more value-added tasks.
Furthermore, because the team can trust in the quality and reliability of the data on Gain, the platform elevates the confidence levels within the team. “Gain increases my confidence that the accuracy of the answers we derive from our analysis is relatively high.” - Benjy Mason
The role of technology in today’s deal landscape
As the deal landscape continues to evolve and become more competitive, it's imperative for firms to focus on differentiation to remain top performing players. One of the best ways to do this is to create efficiencies within operational processes by leveraging technology.
As Inflexion continues to leverage Gain in their daily operations, our technology’s ongoing advancements further contribute to their sustained success and position them as leading players in mid-market private equity.
