Commercial diligence that re-priced a fintech acquisition by 22%.
A PE sponsor asked us to validate a growth story. What we found instead was a customer concentration risk hidden inside a headline metric.
Valuation re-priced downward
Months of contract runway flagged
Return on diligence fees at close
The Challenge
The target was a lending platform showing 60% YoY origination growth. The sponsor had a signed IOI at a valuation that assumed the growth continued for three years.
The seller's data room was tidy but every metric was aggregate. No cohorts, no channel split, no unit economics past the first order.
Our Approach
We reconstructed cohorts from anonymised transaction data and ran 32 primary interviews across borrowers, channel partners and two churned enterprise accounts.
The picture that emerged: 70% of origination growth came from a single embedded-finance partnership whose contract was up for renewal in nine months, with a rival platform actively competing for it.
"They found what the seller's bankers had spent three months hiding. In four weeks."
— Partner, mid-market PE firm
Standalone economics on the remaining book were healthy but growing at 12%, not 60%. We built two scenarios for the sponsor with explicit assumptions on partnership retention.
The Outcome
The engagement delivered 22% on valuation re-priced downward, 9 on months of contract runway flagged, and 3× on return on diligence fees at close — measurable, defensible, and owned by the client team on day one after handover.
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