Valuations/409As
Quantifying Risk. Valuing the Intangible.
At the heart of Wellesley Hills Financial’s Strategic Advisory Services lies our valuation, financial modeling, and analytical capabilities. Unlike many larger investment banks, our managing members established their banking bona fides through the design, build, and proactive evolution of bespoke financial models which accurately represent the specialized asset types we focus on in financial technology and tech-enabled software.
Determining the value of technology assets has always been, and will continue to be, a challenge for bankers due to the nature of the Technology Life Cycle (TLC). Whereas 20 years ago, the economics of the four stages of the TLC was easier to model, the sheer velocity of today’s TLC, and its individual phases, make assigning fair market value to technology assets extremely difficult to pin down. This is especially true of assets in our investment banking services.
Valuation, Analytics, and Strategic Advisory Services
The explosion of new software and financial technologies precipitated by the combination of the surge in pandemic-induced digital transformation and prodigious amounts of cheap capital, has further amplified these challenges. The average small business uses up to twelve different SaaS products to operate. And the breadth of evolution in financial technologies has been breathtaking, including the burgeoning sectors of open banking / data aggregation and blockchain, along with (finally) multiple, operational real-time-payment rails.
This is why our fintech banking backgrounds and expertise are so important – there’s a lot of “new” technology out there, and the “new, new” technology is being developed faster than ever.
Asset-Specific Financial Models for Valuation
We solve for these modern valuation and analytical challenges with proprietary, continuously updated, asset-specific financial models specifically developed to capture the risks associated with these highly specialized, recurring revenue-based assets. We also design our models to account for the intangible value that technology assets bring to bear. Doing so requires a careful and thoughtful assessment of invested dollars, competitive landscape, use cases and applications, and staying power.
Our valuation work and analytics are not the product of financial textbook methodologies per se.
They’re the result of having built sophisticated, asset-specific models to capture the intrinsic value and risks of SaaS and fintech assets themselves.