Houlihan Lokey Brings Speed and Security to Secondaries Fundraising with DealCentre AI

Overview

Houlihan Lokey is a leading global investment bank specializing in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), capital solutions, financial restructuring, and financial and valuation advisory.

A team of approximately ten in the firm’s Paris office acts as a placement agent for private equity (PE) firms, helping clients raise capital for general partner (GP)-led and limited partner (LP)-led secondary transactions as well as co-investments. The team chose SS&C Intralinks DealCentre AI to streamline the management of these fundraising processes.

Situation

In a traditional M&A process, prospective buyers conduct due diligence on a company. In secondaries fundraising, investors may instead assess interests in an existing fund, a portfolio of fund interests or assets moving into a continuation vehicle. Houlihan Lokey helps its private equity clients present those opportunities to the market and guides prospective investors through due diligence.

The process requires sharing sensitive fund, asset and performance information with multiple parties under strict access controls. “The main challenge is confidentiality — of the buyer, the seller, everything,” explains Yoni Fitoussi, an analyst on Houlihan Lokey’s Paris secondaries team.

The team’s administrative workload is heaviest during data room preparation and investor outreach. Documents must be reviewed and prepared for due diligence, and participants require prompt access to the data room once they sign their non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The team needed an intuitive platform to streamline time-consuming administrative tasks while maintaining full control over sensitive information.

Solution

Houlihan Lokey worked with SS&C Intralinks to adapt DealCentre AI to its secondaries fundraising process. The platform’s flexible structure allows the team to tailor its preparation and diligence stages to placement agent workflows, creating an intuitive, self-service experience.

During preparation, advisors organize materials and establish access controls before opening the data room to investors. As fundraising moves into diligence, the team uses granular permissions to give each approved participant access to the appropriate documents and revoke access if the investor exits the process.

Centralizing data room preparation, document sharing and investor communications in one workspace reduces routine administrative work and frees the team to focus on advancing the fundraising process. “It’s super easy to use,” Fitoussi says of the platform. “It’s very clear and very straightforward.”

Results

With DealCentre AI in place, the Paris team now has a faster, more consistent way to manage secondaries due diligence. The time savings have been significant. “For an LP-led transaction, I think it represents about 50 percent of our time,” Fitoussi says of preparing and administering the data room. “For other deals, it’s a bit less — around 20 or 25 percent.”

The team has used Intralinks across approximately ten projects and plans to use DealCentre AI for other transactions. Fitoussi describes the new environment as an upgrade over the legacy platform, citing its clarity and ease of use. Intralinks’ highly responsive support team has also helped resolve questions and issues without disrupting ongoing work. “When we have a question or an issue, we can give them a call and they fix it,” Fitoussi says.

Looking ahead

As Houlihan Lokey expands its use of DealCentre AI, the team plans to explore Link, the platform’s proprietary AI assistant. Purpose-built to support capital raising and other financial transactions, Link helps advisors query diligence materials using conversational prompts, summarize lengthy documents and provide answers with citations to the underlying sources. AI-powered redaction accelerates document preparation, while engagement tracking helps advisors identify where investor interest is building.

Together, these capabilities reduce document handling, support faster responses to investor questions and give senior advisors a clearer view of each fundraise. By helping the team retain institutional knowledge and reuse workflows across transactions, DealCentre AI allows Houlihan Lokey to manage fundraising more efficiently and strengthen its offering to prospective clients.

Ready to streamline your entire deal process? Talk to our sales team to learn how DealCentre AI can help.