How IFS and PwC Transform M&A with Harvey

About IFS and PwC

IFS is the world's leading provider of industrial AI for businesses that manufacture, service, and manage complex assets. Its corporate development function leads a highly active M&A program, coordinating internal teams spanning different geographies and time zones.

PwC is the leading professional services firm, bringing a range of capabilities to help organizations solve faster, achieve more and realize greater value. Its Deals team advises clients on complex transactions across every stage of the deal lifecycle.

The Challenge: Speed Without Blind Spots

Modern M&A moves faster than ever. Deal teams face a persistent tension: go deep and risk missing something important, or go broad and risk missing critical detail.

"There's this sort of catch-22 around breadth and depth," said Binstead. "You're either going to go deep into the areas that you think are most important, but then there's this nagging worry that we're not going broad enough."

Compounding this, coordinating multiple internal teams and external advisors across jurisdictions introduces its own complexity: managing privilege, protecting proprietary information, and ensuring the right people access the right materials, all while a live deal is in motion.

The Solution: One Secure Workspace, Full Deal Intelligence

IFS and PwC deployed Harvey's Shared Spaces to create a single, secure, AI-powered environment for their deals, resolving both the breadth-depth tension and the collaboration challenge in one platform.

A Foundation of Trust Enabling Collaboration

For IFS to share sensitive materials — board papers, proprietary analysis — with an external advisor inside a shared digital workspace is a significant act of trust. Harvey makes that trust possible. Its platform makes it simple to partition access across different groups, so each party sees exactly what they should, nothing more.

"The great thing about Harvey as a platform is that it's incredibly simple to partition the privilege and access rights of different groups," said Binstead. "Where we've got different advisors collaborating together, we can make sure that what needs to be shared can be shared, but can protect what we need to protect."

IFS has started using Vaults earlier and earlier in the deal process, sharing selected data with PwC's team at the outset. PwC, in turn, shares research on the target company and its industry, including publicly available information, market reports and proprietary knowledge to enrich the shared environment for deeper, more comprehensive analysis.

"The fact that we can also share data that Russell's team is bringing in means that it makes a richer environment for us to run our analysis on," Binstead noted.

A Comprehensive, Queryable Knowledge Base

PwC uses Vault to work with entire virtual data rooms — often tens of thousands of documents — and uses additional sources of market insight and PwC knowledge to complement this information. The result is a comprehensive, instantly queryable knowledge base for the transaction.

"I will use it as a first pass to get me a broad coverage of commercial considerations, early quality of earnings, business overview," Taylor explained. "The platform will then produce what I would say is a super professional output that gives you that early understanding of the business and gets you up to speed really, really quickly."

Finding Needles in Haystacks

Harvey's ability to analyze the full data room surfaces insights that would otherwise stay buried. In one engagement, PwC used Harvey to identify the drivers of customer churn, pulling relevant details from board reports, customer contracts, and documents scattered across the data room.

"You actually find needles in haystacks — information around particular customers may be hidden in a board report somewhere, hidden in a customer contract," said Taylor.

Source-Level Verification

Critically, Harvey allows deal teams to trace every insight back to its source documentation. For a professional services firm where reputation is paramount, the ability to cross-check and verify findings at the document level is essential.

"The ability to go down to the source documentation, cross-check, find that document — I think that's a functionality point that is really, really critical because ultimately it's our professional reputation on the line," Taylor said.

The Impact: A New Model for Dealmaking

Together, IFS and PwC have used Harvey to fundamentally reshape how they approach M&A, replacing the traditional trade-off between speed and thoroughness with a model that delivers both.

Harvey changes the approach to heavy lifting across the deal process. Tasks that were once time-consuming and tedious can be supported by the platform, freeing deal teams to focus on strategic value creation — analyzing risks, identifying opportunities, and making better-informed investment decisions.

"It takes the heavy lifting, doesn't it?" said Binstead. "The stuff that would've been incredibly time consuming and in some ways tedious. You can focus in on that real sort of value add."

For PwC, Harvey enables domain experts to leverage decades of experience more effectively. Rather than spending time compiling information, Taylor and his team can direct their expertise toward analysis, judgment, and client service.

"It allows me to really demonstrate my domain expertise," said Taylor. "I love it because it just allows me to do what I've done for the last 25 years more efficiently, more effectively, but really leveraging off my experience."

Looking ahead, both IFS and PwC see Harvey as a catalyst for a new era of dealmaking: one defined not only by speed, but by depth of insight.

"I think it can and will change the way that we do M&A," said Binstead. "The speed of the process has become incredibly compressed, but Harvey can take that to the next level. Importantly, it can also help us take the quality to the next level. We can get levels of insight that we've never been able to get before. That's going to stop us doing some deals that we really shouldn't do, but it's also perhaps going to help us do some deals that perhaps we might not have done in the past. And for us as a business, that's a great outcome."