In a world where time is running out for due diligence – and a single deal contains mountains of documents – one M&A advisor must race against the clock to conceal sensitive information, or face the wrath of international law. It might sound like a movie trailer, but that’s reality for dealmakers today.

The typical timeframe for due diligence has shrunk to less than sixty days. And much can be lost to the most time-hungry task: redaction. When a deal involves not just sensitive commercial data, but personal data too, the redaction burden may be huge. Unless, of course, you’re armed with Datasite’s AI-powered redaction.

The compliance challenge
Why would you need an artificial brain to handle redaction for you? Well, consider one of the most challenging types of transaction: non-performing loan (NPL) deals. These can be huge projects, involving thousands of mortgage documents containing personally identifiable information (PII). PII comes in many languages, patterns, and types, all of which need to be redacted to comply with data protection laws such as GDPR.

You’ll need to find and conceal EU national identification numbers, French tax identification numbers, Irish Personal Public Service numbers, and much more. Usually it means days or weeks of intense work. But not anymore.

AI to the rescue
The built-in redaction tool in our Diligence data room is now better than ever. In response to your feedback, we’ve enhanced the AI to identify a huge range of PII. Not just the obvious things like social security numbers and currencies, but hundreds more types, across multiple jurisdictions.

Italian fiscal codes? We check for those. UK NHS numbers? Covered. Not to mention names, birthdates, phone numbers, email addresses, passport numbers, driver’s license numbers, tax IDs, VAT numbers, financial account numbers, IP Addresses… the list goes on. The data room AI recognizes and redacts them all. With just a few clicks you can be GDPR compliant, in minutes instead of days or weeks.

As easy as one, two, three
And it’s so simple. First, set your reasons for each type of redaction – commercial, strategic, GDPR, or something else. Each redaction reason has a color-coded tag, so you can identify them at a glance. Then select your file rooms and folders for redaction, and the AI gets to work (it even detects document language).

You’ll see redaction drafts for each document, with suggested redactions marked. Just review the suggestions and either confirm them, or ignore them to decline. Then it’s time to go live.

If and when the time comes to unredact (for instance, when you find an exclusive buyer), you can reveal the necessary information selectively, by redaction reason. One click and it’s done. So if anything is ‘for your eyes only’, no-one else can see it.

Redaction doesn’t have to be mission impossible – not when your documents can self-redact in five seconds.