Deal-execution glossary
Plain definitions for the terms behind Arvya and the deal-execution category.
What is a Deal Brain?
A Deal Brain is a single sourced record of everything happening on a deal. It pulls from email, calls, meetings, trackers, CRM, documents, and data rooms, keeps every fact tied to the source it came from, and stays current as the deal moves. It is the memory a deal team can ask questions of and act on.
What is AI deal execution?
AI deal execution is using AI to do the operational work around a live deal: updating the CRM and trackers, drafting follow-ups, scheduling, preparing weekly updates, and answering deal questions with sources. A human approves each action. It is execution, not advice. The AI prepares the work and the team decides.
What is a closed-loop deal process?
A closed-loop deal process is one where deal activity, the record of it, and the next action stay connected. Work happening on the deal updates the record, the record drives the next step, and a human approves before anything goes out. Nothing falls through the cracks between systems.
What is deal management software?
Deal management software helps deal teams track pipeline, relationships, and process across a transaction. Traditional tools are CRMs the team types into, like DealCloud, Salesforce, or Affinity. Newer approaches build a sourced deal record automatically and prepare the next action for approval, so the record stays current without manual entry.
What is CRM hygiene?
CRM hygiene is how complete, accurate, and current the records in a CRM are. Good hygiene means contacts, statuses, criteria, and activity reflect reality. Poor hygiene means blank fields, duplicates, stale facts, and records nobody trusts. At deal firms, hygiene fails structurally: updating the CRM is extra work with no immediate payoff, so it loses to live deal work every time.
What is CRM drift?
CRM drift is the gap that opens between a CRM and reality as the outside world changes. People change firms, funds close, investment criteria shift, portfolios turn over, and none of it types itself into the record. Drift happens even at firms with perfect logging discipline, because the facts decay on their own schedule.
What is institutional memory at a deal firm?
Institutional memory is what a firm collectively knows about its relationships and deals: who was shown what, why a buyer passed, what a sponsor promised, which processes went well and why. At most firms it lives in individual inboxes, notes, and heads, so it walks out the door with every departure and rotation.
What is a pre-call brief?
A pre-call brief is the preparation document a banker reads before a meeting: who the attendees are, the firm's strategy and holdings, every prior interaction, deals previously shown and their outcomes, open commitments, and what has changed since the last conversation. A good brief is sourced, every fact carries where it came from and how recent it is.
What is read-after-write verification for CRM updates?
Read-after-write verification means that after an approved update is written to a CRM, the system reads the destination record back and confirms the change actually landed, then links the exact record as a receipt. Failures surface explicitly instead of disappearing. It turns 'the update was sent' into 'the update is provably in the record.'
What is a buyer tracker in M&A?
A buyer tracker is the working document a sell-side team uses to run a process: every potential buyer, their status (contacted, NDA, CIM sent, IOI, passed), key dates, and next steps. It is usually an Excel or SharePoint sheet updated by hand from emails, calls, and meetings, which is why it is chronically a week behind the process it describes.
What is a verified CRM update?
A verified CRM update is a change to a CRM record that carries its evidence (the quote or source it came from), is approved by a person before anything is written, is written to the CRM, and is then read back to confirm the change actually landed. Every step is auditable. It is the opposite of blind auto-sync, where changes flow into the record with no evidence, no approval, and no proof they arrived.
What is an evidence receipt (read-after-write verification)?
An evidence receipt is the proof produced after a system writes a change to a CRM: the system reads the destination record back and shows that the new value is actually there, linked to the exact record. It closes the gap between the write was sent and the write landed. Trust in a system that touches your CRM comes from receipts, not promises.
What is a Company Brain?
A Company Brain is firm-wide deal memory: every Deal Brain the firm builds, connected together, so cross-deal knowledge is queryable and every fact keeps its source. One deal knows what another deal learned about the same buyer, sponsor, or sector. Per-deal Deal Brains are live today; the Company Brain is the direction Arvya is building toward now. Call us to see where it stands.
What is bulk CRM enrichment?
Bulk CRM enrichment is filling many stale or blank CRM records at once from public sources, such as SEC filings and firm websites, with every proposed value citing its source and a human approving before anything is written. It replaces one-off manual research with a reviewed batch process, and it differs from buying a data list, which arrives uncited and starts going stale the day it lands.
What is an in-tenant AI deployment?
An in-tenant AI deployment runs the AI inside the customer's own cloud tenant, such as their Azure environment, rather than in the vendor's cloud. Deal data never leaves the firm's environment, access flows through the firm's existing permissions, and the firm's own security controls apply. For financial firms handling confidential deal information, security teams increasingly treat this as a requirement, not a preference.
What is sponsor coverage?
Sponsor coverage is the investment banking practice of systematically tracking private equity sponsors: their funds, investment criteria, check sizes, sector appetite, portfolio moves, and recent conversations. Done well, it means the right buyers surface for every mandate and every sponsor call starts warm. It runs on the sponsor records in the CRM, which is why stale records quietly break it.
What is CRM writeback?
CRM writeback is an AI system writing changes into the CRM, such as DealCloud or Salesforce, rather than only reading from it. It is what turns AI from a summary tool into something that keeps the record current. Safe writeback requires three things: a human approval gate before every write, field-level evidence showing where each value came from, and a read-after-write receipt proving the change landed.
What is MCP (Model Context Protocol) for deal teams?
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard for connecting AI assistants like Claude and Microsoft Copilot to tools and data sources. For a deal firm, an MCP server in front of the firm's verified deal memory means the assistants bankers already use can answer deal and relationship questions from sourced firm knowledge, with the firm's permissions enforced and every access logged. Arvya's MCP access is in development.