London 26 October 2011 – The increased time and complexity involved in conducting M&A due diligence has led to nearly three quarters (72%) of dealmakers working on a transaction while on their most recent holiday, according to a survey conducted by Imprima, a leading provider of iRooms virtual data rooms and financial communication services.

Mobile devices have made it much easier to work on deals while out of the office – 89% of respondents said that they use a mobile to work on a transaction.  The most popular devices are Blackberrys (73%), iPhones (22%) and iPads (18%).

According to the research, the majority (58%) of respondents said that the due diligence process has taken longer to complete over the past three years, while 63% said that it had become more complex.

More than a third of M&A professionals (37%) said that lack of time is now the biggest cause of stress when working on a deal.  Other sources of stress generated by M&A deals include other parties not delivering information on time (26%), poor or inaccurate documentation (22%) and pressure from other parties involved in the deal (14%). 

While being able to work on deals remotely interferes with holidays, it also cuts down work travel time.  Only 4.4% of respondents said that spending too much time travelling was the biggest cause of stress when working on deals.  Yet the percentage of deals involving multiple countries is now relatively high, with 12% of respondents reporting that 100% of deals that they had worked on in the past three years were multi-country.  Only 5% said that 100% of deals involved only one country, while the highest proportion (29%) said that up to half of their transactions involved cross-border work.

Meredith Foster at Imprima said: “The due diligence process has grown in complexity over recent years and this has been exacerbated by the new Takeover Panel rules, which nearly half of those we surveyed thought would make M&A activity even more time consuming.  All of this has placed additional pressure on the deal teams.

“In this new environment, companies need to find ways to make the M&A process as smooth and efficient as possible, harnessing the power of virtual data rooms (VDRs) and secure online document sharing.”