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Published on Citywire on March 11, 2025 | Authored by Lilly Riddle
RIA M&A consultancy Alaris Acquisitions on Tuesday unveiled a new technology tool for buyers and sellers.
Called ‘Lens,’ the tool uses data on 87 RIA buyers to provide sell-side clients with the best 10 to 15 matches based on characteristics like fee model, acquisition structure and custodial needs, as well as more hard-to-pin-down concepts like investment philosophy and general worldview.
Lens uses an artificial intelligence (AI) program trained on data Alaris chief executive Allen Darby said took ‘thousands of hours’ to collect to rank potential partnerships on whether the match would be ‘optimal,’ ‘strong,’ ‘moderate’ or ‘weak.’ Other stats used by Lens include deal objectives, what the seller needs in cash versus equity, whether they’re seeking a minority or full acquisition and how much the seller wants to grow organically.
Darby said Lens can serve as an alternative to the more traditional M&A auction process, which he said can drive selling prices up but leave firms in the dark when it comes to whether the pairing will be a good cultural fit.
‘The auction process treats this transaction like it’s selling a car, when the proper analogy is more like a marriage,’ Darby said. ‘We’re proposing, what if there were a way that a buyer and a seller, without having to interact with one another, could determine if they were indeed a match for one another?’
After creating an account, Lens users receive a draft valuation based on their answers to a standardized set of questions. Users also have access to the ‘knowledge center,’ which provides information on how M&A transactions work and can answer basic questions they might have. Finally, they reach the ‘explore buyers’ page, where firms can explore all the attributes of potential partners.
‘[The ‘explore buyers’ tool] is what’s taken so long to aggregate for us,’ Darby said. ‘We represent the seller, but the buyers have signed contractual agreements with us to basically share their data. On every instance we onboard a buyer, we have 20 to 50 hours of time with them, learning everything about their business.’
After completing a ‘deal ready assessment,’ in which Alaris seeks to understand what the seller is looking for in a partnership, the AI program sifts through its database to run a matchmaking process that invites two or three already-vetted buyers to the table, rather than dozens.
‘It’s like Match.com between the parties,’ Darby said.
The tool’s release comes just a few months after Alaris exited its own partnership with Merchant Investment Management, which had been a minority investor in the business since 2021.
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