Ansarada targets the South African deal market amid global volatility

• Ansarada's expansion into the South African deal market.
• A due diligence focus amid global volatility.

Shows Ansarada's geographic reach beyond Australia and New Zealand.

and cross-border ambitions.

Because M&A doesn't just move capital, it moves businesses, industries and futures forward.

We're for South African business, for progress, for ambition, for what comes next.

Ansarada.

We're for South African M&A.

Due Diligence on Classic Business is proudly brought to you by Ansarada, made for South African M&A.

Welcome to Due Diligence here on Classic Business, the feature where we unpack the arts, of dealmaking, of capital allocation and corporate strategy.

Now, we entered 2026 as a country with something we haven't enjoyed consistently for some time, some real momentum.

There was a flurry of year-end transactions, several of meaningful scale, and it looked like we were finally beginning to talk about growth and offensive dealmaking.

Then came late February, and obviously the conflict in the Middle East, rattling global markets, sending oil prices surging, how economies like ours are exposed to these kinds of external shocks.

Yet intriguingly, the deal machine hasn't stopped.

Advisors tell me that the turbulence and valuation swings linked to the Iran conflict haven't killed appetite and they've simply slowed the closing process as investors adopt a more cautious and wait and see posture.

And certainly the numbers are bearing that out.

Well, against that backdrop, we're delighted to welcome a new partner to the future, Ansarada, which is the AI-driven fintech platform that's become a .

And joining us from Sydney for the very first episode, under the new partnership, is Justin Smith.

He's Managing Director of Ansarada.

And Justin, wonderful to have you on the show.

Welcome to South Africa, I've got to say, at least virtually for now.

But before we get into markets and M&A, Ansarada itself has quite an interesting story.

Founded down under, built through technology, then scaled globally, , sitting in a sizeable private equity transaction.

So just give us the kind of elevator pitch.

What exactly is Ansarada and what problem were you trying to solve?

Well, great to be on the show, Michael.

I think if you think about Ansarada, we are the secure infrastructure that powers high-stake transactions.

When a company is being bought, sold, listed or raising capital, there is an enormous amount of sensitive information that needs to move between lawyers , or advisors, investors, or potential buyers.

They need to move it securely, quickly, and they need to have audit trails to justify everything that's happened during that deal.

And we build a platform that makes that possible.

You think of us as a secure deal operating system.

Underneath some of the world's most significant transactions, especially in the Africa region, trillions of dollars have been transacted through our platform.

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is or was the traditional deal-making process behind the scenes?

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, which today can be moved digitally.

If you look back a couple of decades ago, due diligence room was literally a physical room, a space where buyers would sit, they would take notes by hand, they would read documents under supervision for a certain amount of time before the next set of bankers would come into the room.

And about two decades ago, we set about digitizing that.

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We had to develop all sorts of ways of structuring material information, of delivering insights from that structural information.

And essentially, at Answerata, we're obsessed with what we call order.

Because what we found is the more order you bring to a transaction or a critical process, the more value is driven from that.

And essentially, we have seen when you're in a data room like Answerata, is ordered, is structured, is processed for the end viewer, then it drives real economic value.

Yeah, and value is the key word here because a lot of market watchers, they might only see the kind of shiny press release on sends at the end of a transaction.

They don't go and see the sleepless nights, the missing documents, the version control nightmares that you spoke of when things were done manually and paper-based and all of that.

, how much value destruction historically tended to happen simply because the process itself was inefficient?

Yeah, I think it's a question of value and security.

I had a New Zealand dealmaker said to me last week, he said, I don't feel safe unless it's in Ansarata.

And I think it's difficult to quantify precisely, but anecdotally, the evidence from our customers often is staggering.

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Deals often collapse in the final stages because there's material document gaps.

deals.

And we've seen a lot of deals fall over for reasons that have nothing to do with the underlying business.

And they fell over because the process wasn't right and the security had let them down.

Essentially, that's why Ansarata exists, is to really fix that, is to bring order to that process.

And the more order you see, the greater the valuation.

And you are seeing, especially in the African region and the South Africa region, the process is, the greater the valuations are extending.

And we are seeing valuations really significant growth in the region right now.

Which is fantastic to hear for the local M&A industry as well, because I've long thought that the valuation gap was far too high.

But also when you talk about bringing order to chaos, a big buzzword at the moment is obviously AI.

Everyone's talking about AI.

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And the thing about artificial intelligence is, I think, if used correctly, it really is one of those technologies where you can see an outsized return on how it's implemented.

In your world, where confidentiality and governance and precision really matter, we recently had the mythos story where the banks are certainly concerned about security being breached.

But where is AI genuinely adding value in M&A right now?

, you know, incredible speed at the moment.

For us, AI really sits, I would say, in three key areas that really sit across the full life cycle of M&A.

First is what we call answer data intelligence or document intelligence, you can tell.

We move from traditional data room, which was document storage, to what I would call document understanding.

in seconds.

And advisors can focus on the negotiation and the deal, not the filing.

And the second thing that sits in Answerata Intelligence is insights.

It's red flagging, it's risk identification, it's surfacing anomalies in the data room that a reviewer that may miss at 2 a.

m.

or day 40 on a deal process.

And it's the efficiencies that it's driving from what would take , sometimes weeks to redacting documents.

AI can do this within minutes now, bulk redacting, thousands of documents.

And then what's important in the region when you're getting a lot of investment from the Gulf and from Indian investment is AI translation.

We have AI translation through the platform that for those cross-border deals that the AI can translate the documents into local language.

, which we've been working for the last decade on AI, we've had this within our platform, is buyer engagement in a deal.

Our AI can predict the winning buyer on a deal with 97% accuracy.

So we can predict these are the top buyers, and that means that the advisors, the bankers, and the lawyers can concentrate on the right parties through the negotiation process, which drives a higher valuation because you've got the right with the right parties.

And I'll say that's a very significant innovation that is only in Ansarata.

And the third, I would say, is deal readiness.

We've really said about that every organization, no matter its size or scale, should have a great health within the business and being deal ready.

So the platform with the AI helps you be deal ready with preparedness.

That is often underappreciated, being deal ready, because .

That's about being business ready.

And the greater you are ready for a deal, the more health you're successful in that valuation will be higher.

And the respectable and the professionalness of even a small, medium enterprise delivering to third parties is outstanding.

And I'll point out a difference with Ansarata's AI is it's housed within our secure infrastructure.

into large language models, even though that we do use OpenAI and Anthropic as the models, but it's housed within our secure walls.

So nothing's leaked.

No large language model learns from it.

It's housed within Anserata's secure, trusted infrastructure.

Yeah, and I think that's critical nowadays when you're dealing, especially with such sensitive information and the stakes are so incredibly high in a deal process.

But often on this program, .

We've spoken exactly about that deal readiness phase of trying to attract the right buyer and also getting the highest valuation possible.

You've got to ensure that you are exit ready, that you're deal ready, that there are no funny skeletons that are going to be surfaced through a due diligence process that catch you off guard, put you on the back foot, and then lower the exit multiple at the end of the day.

So that is so critical.

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That said, though, I guess, you know, it's a nascent technology and some might still feel uncomfortable as to how much you hand over to the AI.

Where do humans still absolutely need to remain in the loop through the process?

Look, there's no doubt that intelligence is becoming a commodity.

But humans need to be at the point of consequence.

For me, AI can accelerate the work.

It should not own the judgment.

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Look, I'm comfortable with AI assisting in the preparation, being deal ready, the guidance.

You can summarize documents, you can red flag them, do pattern recognition.

But relationships matter.

Humans must remain accountable for the advice that they give, the commercial judgment, disclosure decisions, valuations, and negotiations.

And in South Africa, that's the handshake.

It still matters.

It still matters those great relationships, the final .

Because high stakes works like transactions, AI, I think, should make the expert better.

It should not pretend to replace the expert.

And I think from what I know about the last decade visiting South Africa and doing deals in South Africa, you're seeing that will never replace those critical relationships that are in that market.

Yeah, we are very much still a market that relies quite heavily on those relationships, .

.

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Absolutely.

And it's actually meaningful.

The last 12 months have been one of the best years we've had in the South African market.

As you say, a few years, I think globally was defensive.

Survival capital, restructurings, consolidated, driven by stress.

And what we're now seeing is a return to that growth conviction.

Strategic acquisitions, we're seeing a lot of cross-border expansion, especially from the Gulf, from India, and Indian buyers and private equity funds deploying capital.

to scale their businesses.

Emerging markets are particularly interesting because of that growth differential compared to the developed markets.

I think it's real.

When governance improves and infrastructure stabilizes, capital won't stay on the sidelines for very long.

And our data actually backs that up.

South Africa is actually a really compelling case study for us right now.

is up 50%.

That tells you momentum is generally building, volumes are up, values up.

And when you see growth like that, it usually means decisions that were sitting on the fence are finally getting made.

And we've seen that in the last 12 months.

Business confidence, when it shifts, tends to move in clusters.

And we have seen that volume move.

But it's been interesting to see what deal activity is concentrated.

, that we are seeing on the data room and on the platform of what is actually happening in the market.

We're seeing real estate in the South African market as a real standout in the last 12 months, accounting for around 36% of successful listed deals.

And it's carried the momentum into 2026, the early stages.

The tailwinds are structural.

As you mentioned, the South Africa's removal of the Financial Action Task Force, that grey listing, was a real hindrance for a while.

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And the government body yields at a six-year low now.

When your cost of capital falls and sovereign risk profiles improves, property assets become very attractive and very quickly to both domestic and foreign capital.

And I'll say the second one we're seeing as a trend is consumer.

South Africa led the continent in consumer M&A, more than 180 deals we've seen in the last 12 months.

The Coca-Cola Beverage Africa acquisition, .

The other interesting one I'll point out is healthcare.

is an emerging one.

Deal values surged in this on the first half of the last 12 months.

And what's particularly notable is the source of the capital is coming from the Gulf and the Indian investors who are increasingly treating African healthcare as a strategic asset.

Part of what they're calling the South-South investment shift where emerging market is moving between markets rather than waiting for the Northern Hemisphere approval.

And that's generally a new dynamic.

It ranks the corporate finance industry, , they have the great dealmakers dinner every year.

What has that partnership taught you about the country?

Well, it's taught me that South Africa, much like Australia's, we punch above our weight.

And in terms of deal sophistication, these are the best of the best.

The advisors in South Africa, the bankers, the lawyers, the corporate financials, are generally world class.

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You have many obstacles in this market that other markets, bankers in New York and the bankers in London, would never experience some of the blacklisting, some of the geopolitical risks, the resilience and the hurdles that have to be over.

Is that resilience only exists in South Africa?

And the other thing that struck me about the relationship with dealmakers and being part of that is that actually .

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It, for me, is one of my most favorite events when we do the yearly awards just because of the camaraderie and the relationships that are in the South African market.

Yeah, an industry that I think we can be very proud of in South Africa.

I know in South Africa, the national pastime can sometimes be a little bit parochial and we navel gaze and we bemoan the fact that our government hasn't really lived up to our high hopes and expectations and there was load shedding and all of these things.

, but they are real pockets of excellence, much like the Springboks that we can really be as a country very proud of.

Had to get it in there ahead of the World Cup next year, Justin.

You mentioned something very interesting, though, and that more than 50% of your customers now on board without human interaction.

And you mentioned the importance of relationships earlier, but I think that's just remarkable for a platform operating in something as high stakes as corporate transactions, where you're talking about multiple billions of rands in value.

I mean, what does that say about how buyer behavior in enterprise software is changing?

Look, I think it says it's changed permanently.

I mean, if you think about how we used to purchase products in general, let alone enterprise software, we often had to talk to many humans and salespeople and the process.

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Now a consumer can research it, test it, onboard it, get validation from review sites.

They can do all the research before they've even made their first point of contact with you.

And that doesn't change even if it's high capital, even if it's a high-stake deal.

For us, they thought we were pretty crazy launching e-commerce for deal-making.

some years ago, but now we see almost 50% of corporate customers are onboarding without human interaction.

It shows that even in high stakes deals, users want simplicity.

And that's essentially what we obsess with, sophisticated simplicity.

The product has to explain itself.

The journey has to be easy.

It needs to guide the user.

It needs to create the confidence, the trust, even from the first interaction.

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Is there a generational shift?

I think we see it almost in every industry, but I suspect the younger dealmakers that are entering investment banking and law and private equity today probably expect a very different technology experience from the generation before them.

Are traditional corporate finance firms and institutions adapting quickly enough .

Some are.

Many are not.

I actually don't think it's just generational.

Of course, the younger generation of investment bankers and lawyers and private equity has grown up with intuitive technology.

I mean, everyone is using Gemini or OpenAI or Claude, you know, to do their tasks quicker and easier.

And they expect that in everything they do to be , intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent, intelligent , it doesn't replace it, it's just concentrating it.

Technology strips out all the friction used to consume relationships and the administration.

You no longer need to have multiple face-to-face meetings to share a data room, talk about a data room, buy a data room.

You get back to the relationship, and that's what we talk about in your region.

Relationships matter, and you want that time back as a trusted advisor to spend the hours on the judgment and the strategy, not on administration.

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In a relationship-driven market like South Africa, Enserata becomes an accelerant because the best dealmakers here will use technology to be more present where it matters most.

And that, for me, is in the relationship and in the negotiation and in the judgment.

Yeah, and I'm sure we're going to see a lot more of those relationships into the World Cup next year between Australia and South Africa.

There's a healthy rivalry there.

I'm not that confident as you are on that World Cup, but we'll see.

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It could be you in the final, but we look forward to housing you over here when it's in Australia.

Listen, Australians always have a way of picking themselves up, especially when they're hosting a tournament or event.

It's just in your DNA as well.

I think Joe Schmidt's done a great job with our team, so it should be a fantastic event.

Really can't wait for it.

Speaking of that, I want to touch briefly on leadership and your journey and your career, Justin, because it spans entrepreneurship and scaling businesses and science .

, or you're making promises that your brand can't consistently deliver on.

From my experience of where I've had success or where I've observed the 58,000 transactions on this platform, the companies that scale well are almost boring and disciplined.

They nail the repeatable motion before they accelerate it.

They find product market fit.

They find go-to-market fit.

They find the right processes before they scale.

They measure it right.

They build culture deliberately.

around that rather than letting it emerge by accident.

And crucially, the leaders of those companies are honest about what's broken before it becomes critical.

And then they build order around that to improve that process.

Yeah, there has to be a real honesty and then the ability to confront that decisively as well.

And finally, Justin, just sadly as we are running out of time, it's been fascinating having you on the show.

If we sit here again, say three to five years, .

It feels like a long time given how quickly things are changing.

But what does the future of M&A look like from where you're sitting?

In this current age, what was happening six months ago in AI, what's happening now, you'd be loathe to predict what's going to happen in three to five years.

But what I will say is there's a real interesting tension in our industry right now.

As AI is rapidly making intelligence the commodity that I talked about, the analysis of the data room review, , the pattern matching across thousands of documents.

Machines will do that faster.

They'll do it cheaper than any human team can do.

The part of the job that is going to be automated, and frankly, it should be, because it was never where the real value lied in a transaction anyway.

So if intelligence is becoming the commodity, you've got to think what's left.

What's the edge that the modern dealmaker can bring?

For me, I think it's going to be around the people see around the corners.

They can see what's next.

They can see six to nine months in a market.

The dealmaker who wins the next decade, I don't think is going to be the one that has the best model.

It's going to be the one or nor the one who's walked the most floors, but it could be the one that sat across the most tables, survived through cycles, and they know what a deal feels like before the numbers confirm it.

What you could probably call instinct.

is not telling the full truth or the full story.

It's that gut feel that a sector is about to turn in six to nine months before the data catches up.

That generally could be irreplaceable.

And it comes only from experience.

I think the future belongs to the dealmaker who combines both, who uses technology to clear the and then applies the judgment of what's left, who lets the AI do the processing and brings the pattern recognition and the relationships to the tables themselves.

Because there's a lot of rainmakers out there, and the rainmakers who refuse to evolve could become very expensive and very slow.

And then you look on the other side, you've got the technologists who can't build trust and never gets the mandate.

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It's got the miles on the clock.

It's got the intuition, can see around the next corner, and they've got the answer out of tools in their hand.

That person is almost impossible to compete with.

Oh, really interesting, Justin.

Sounds to me like it's that dealmaker who's, you say, polishing the crystal ball to be able to see into the future, but it's now it's that dealmaker who's going to use the experience, who's polishing the right model as well and the right partnership.

, managing director of Ansarada, joining us from Sydney.

Justin, great conversation.

Wonderful to officially welcome Ansarada to the Due Diligence family.

Take care.

Thanks, Michael.

Appreciate it.

You've been listening to Due Diligence on Classic Business, proudly brought to you by Ansarada, made for South African M&A.

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