Investigative Due Diligence
Crisis & Risk Management Guide 2024 : Global-wide
Band 1
About
Provided by S-RM
S-RM’s Deal Advisory practice provides specialist support to clients ahead of transactions, delivering intelligence that informs investment decisions, addresses critical intelligence gaps, and answers strategic questions. The practice undertakes investigative due diligence into companies and prospective management teams to help investors identify, understand, and mitigate risk ahead of investments, M&A, capital markets transactions, joint venture partnerships, market entry, and other high-value commercial decisions.
The practice specialises in assessing integrity issues; reputational concerns; corporate governance; track-records; corruption, bribery and other financial crime concerns; political networks and relationships; regulatory dynamics; ESG issues; and cyber security concerns. The practice’s clients include law firms, leading private equity firms, development finance institutions, impact investors, multinational corporations, investment banks, sovereign wealth funds, and investment managers.
S-RM’s traditional investigators are supported by the company’s cyber security experts, who conduct dark and deep web research and identify cyber risks to investment targets.
The practice’s areas of particular expertise include:
- Pre-transactional due diligence
- ESG due diligence
- Asset provenance investigations
- Stakeholder mapping
- Market entry studies
- Background checks
- Cyber due diligence
Chambers Review
S-RM is a London-headquartered global cyber and intelligence consultancy. The firm's deal advisory team delivers complex pre-transactional due diligence to several of the world's largest private equity houses, corporate/M&A teams, international financial institutions, banks and governments. The team operates globally but has particular expertise gathering intelligence in Asian and the sub-Saharan African markets. The firm's investigators are supported by its cybersecurity experts.
Strengths
Provided by Chambers
"S-RM goes beyond typical background checks and leverages a strong network of relationships to derive more personal insights on the targets at hand."
"S-RM has a lot of language capabilities, which is useful for research in other areas. They can do research in the local language and build out from that."
"The analyst team were genuinely experts in their field and were able to communicate the findings of their research at exactly the right level for our stakeholders."
"S-RM consistently delivers high-quality, detailed reports on a variety of open-source due diligence issues."
"S-RM goes beyond typical background checks and leverages a strong network of relationships to derive more personal insights on the targets at hand."
"S-RM has a lot of language capabilities, which is useful for research in other areas. They can do research in the local language and build out from that."
"The analyst team were genuinely experts in their field and were able to communicate the findings of their research at exactly the right level for our stakeholders."
"S-RM consistently delivers high-quality, detailed reports on a variety of open-source due diligence issues."
Notable Practitioners
Ian Massey heads S-RM's corporate intelligence team in EMEA.Massey is an impressive investigator with a global clientele, regularly advising clients on pre-transactional due diligence and other deal-related intelligence.
"Ian is very pragmatic and extremely good in terms of managing and communicating."
"His bearing and general conduct was particularly impressive and quite obviously is very used to dealing with senior clients. He is clearly very bright and capable."
"Ian is fundamentally collaborative with his clients, and is very much at home with complex matters, requiring nuanced approach."
"Ian is responsive and gives a good quality of work. He seems to deliver us a product that is useable and contextualized in the jurisdictions we operate in."
Morgan Stark is the director of S-RM's Hong Kong operation and the Asia-Pacific head of corporate intelligence. Morgan has overseen S-RM's recent expansion in Asia, with new offices opening in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.
"Morgan has exceptional intellect and a keen sense of geopolitics in the region."
Ranked Individuals at
S-RM
Global-wide
Members
Provided by S-RM
Harriet Lord
Ian Massey
Martin Devenish MBE
Head of Department
Natalie Thomas Stafford
Sam Taylor
Toby Thomas
Industries
Provided by S-RM
Commodity Trading
Consumer Goods
Consumer Services
Financials & Insurance
Industrials
Legal
Oil & Gas
Private Health & Education
Technology