There is no need to be a giant to stand out in the market of confidential document sharing protection. Proximity, agility, and customized services are the keys to success. This is the case for DiliTrust, a French company created for bankers and corporate lawyers over twenty years ago in order to compete with the major American players. Commentary from Nazira David, Business Unit Manager.
Your company is young; how has it made a name for itself in a market with so many players?
We focus on the fact that we are closer to our clients than our competitors—we are located in Paris and provide customer support 7 days of the week rather than using call centers located on the other side of the world. We offer on-site training in and around Paris. Our servers are located in Paris as well. Another key element is our interface, which doesn’t require any training. Lastly, we are simply less expensive than our competitors, and offer a 20% discount if an offer from one of our competitors turns out to be better than ours.
Who exactly are your primary clients?
Our clients consist of investment bankers, corporate lawyers, legal and financial managers for merger and acquisition transactions, cessation of activity, fundraising and compulsory liquidations. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies use our services as well. In fact, businesses from this sector routinely share sensitive documents, especially for clinical test results. We also work on a lot of real estate transactions, and handovers of hotel chains or groups of buildings. Lastly, the law requires all companies with over 300 employees to set up one single database, therefore it is necessary to have a data room to ensure that all representative bodies are put in place.
What are the major challenges nowadays for a company like yours?
– Ensuring total data security: the projects that our clients entrust us with generally contain confidential information, which is why they choose to go through a data room rather than other online “cloud”-type solutions. Therefore, DiliTrust must offer a maximum level of security.
– Providing reliable support, so that DiliTrust clients and users are able to concentrate solely on their projects. Thus it is necessary to have a responsive and permanently accessible customer service to help set up data rooms, load documents, manage access rights on a daily basis, train individuals, and export content onto CDs.
– Having an appropriate tool with functionalities that are consistent with client needs (real-time reporting, differentiated rights management, awareness of various document formats, etc.), while simultaneously being intuitive and easy to use.
What has changed about the security process in recent years?
In the past, there were physical data rooms, where the players involved in mergers would come together and shut themselves away to go through documents with a fine-tooth comb and study cases. Today, we have entered the era of the virtual, ultra-secure data room, where every action is highly monitored. The level of security has increased dramatically.
Why has security become such a central issue for your clients?
Security has always been an essential issue for these types of transactions (M&A, pharmaceutical research, compulsory liquidations…), but it is even more essential today. The list of companies that have suffered a data breach is constantly getting longer, and some of them have had difficulty getting back on their feet.
