Efecte acquies InteliWISE, building its position as the leading European IT platform for HR management and service management
Efecte will add AI chatbots and voice assistants to its HR and IT platform which helps employees digitalize and automate their work, with great experiences
Efecte is emerging as the leading European vendor of service management and HR solutions.
Efecte is a European alternative to the global goliaths in service management (ITSM) and HR solutions. The company’s SaaS Platform helps people to digitalize and automate their work. 300 customers across Europe leverage Efecte to run services ranging from IT support to HR with greater agility, improved end-user experience, and lower cost. Efecte is listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market Finland, with its headquarter located in Finland and regional hubs in Germany, Sweden and now in Poland.
Efecte will flush the InteliWISE Conversational AI solutions into its ITSM (IT service management) platform and help more customers across Europe to get access to and benefit from InteliWISE technology. InteliWISE’s AI-driven voice and chat automation platform, integrated with omni-channel live-agent support, has been used by leading global brands, andl will become available for customers across Europe.
Niilo Fredrikson, CEO of Efecte said “In InteliWISE, we see modern conversational AI technology, a strong R&D team and go-to-market that we can help further accelerate. The Inteliwise team not only feels like a cultural fit, but also adds important capabilities and future possibilities through expanding our talent pool and establishing an Efecte R&D, professional services and customer success center in Poland. This is a natural step building on the long-lasting R&D collaboration that we have had for 10+ years with software developers in Poland. Last but not least, the acquisition will also mean establishing Poland as a new direct market for Efecte.
Marcin Strzałkowski, CEO of InteliWISE said “Today, we’re not only talking about customers’ experience, but also about employees’ experience. At InteliWISE we have seen a number of highly successful deployments of AI and bots, which helped global brands to improve the service of help desks and HR departments. Employees today are increasingly faced with digital systems in their work, and challenges like remote collaboration, and they want to have their issues fixed right now, right here, without a fuss. The use of bots for supporting such processes is a predominant choice nowadays, as they deliver it in a natural, conversational mode, at the lowest possible cost of service.“
Efecte will help brands fight employee resignation in times of economic downturn.
The shift in today’s workforce market is immense: pandemy, inflation, fear of recession, abundance of new technologies. In the past, when an employee had an issue with the printer or malfunction in its email or software tools, she or he used to walk-in to helpdesk or HR department. Nowadays, in times of remote collaboration, it’s not an option anymore. What’s more, employees are increasingly becoming mobile, using messengers and mobile apps, at the cost of traditional help desk portals.
All those challenges are raising the complexity in employees’ worlds and result in phenomena such as employees resigning and low employee satisfaction. These ultimately affect organizations’ productivity and their ability to grow. Addressing these concerns is especially important in Europe, where employee’s role and elements like wellbeing are important factors of competitiveness.
Award-winning Chatbots and Voicebots from InteliWISE, added to Efecte’s IT solutions, will help to resolve employees day-to-day problems, provide work benefits faster, and boost the employee experience.
The rising volumes of issues and questions, reported by employees, are becoming a challenge for HR and Helpdesk Teams. Service management solutions like Efecte help managing those issues, resolving problems and helping employees to work more efficiently. Automation is a big topic in this area, as the cost of service and resolution times are affecting the employee satisfaction. Bots, powered by Natural Language Processing Technologies, are the recent remedy, as they are intuitive to use and provide a high level of self-service capability. It is also important that employees can self-solve their issues across an increasing number of touchpoints, including not only mail or phone, but also chat, popular messengers or even video.
Chatbots will help employees beyond a simple self-solve of their issues, bringing automated, personalized recommendations of work benefits, at scale.
The use cases for Efecte solutions range from service management and ticketing to improving employee experiences, business workflows, and customer service. In the short term, Chatbots and Voice Assistants from InteliWISE will speed up and enhance the support of employees’ needs. In the longer term, future features such as powered recommendations, based on Data + AI, should help to scale up the personalized yet automated service to employees.
The Efecte’s “Digitalize and Automate” mission will get a boost with AI automation
InteliWISE’s modern conversational AI technology combined with Efecte service management tools creates a strong platform to connect business with people, built and operated in Europe. It allows customers to take their employee experience to the next level and to benefit from increased automation of any service processes. IT, HR and other business services should be accessible “instantly” – in real time, without waiting time, and in channels of their choice. InteliWISE already delivered more than 200 of its AI-powered chatbots and voice interactive assistants (IVA) to global brands in retail, financial or insurance industry, with an effect of boosting productivity of their service desks or HR teams.
Consideration, valuation and transaction structure of InteliWISE Chatbot company in M&A process
Efecte is a public company, listed on the Nasdaq First North Growth Market Finland marketplace. In May 2022, the company launched the voluntary public tender and the delisting tender offer consisted of a cash consideration of PLN 3.99 (approximately EUR 0.84) in cash per share. The price represented 85% premium vs. the last market quote. This implicated the valuation of InteliWISE at Eur 5.9 million.
Efecte financed the acquisition fully by cash, but has since raised financial loans for 2 MEUR to support financing the transaction. In addition Efecte has concluded a directed share issue to the CEO (Marcin Strzałkowski) and CTO (Grzegorz Siehień) as well as the largest shareholder of InteliWISE to retain the said InteliWISE key persons post acquisition and align their interests towards successful integration of InteliWISE and Efecte’s long term.
By 22 July 2022 Efecte Plc has gained 93.41 percent ownership of all shares in InteliWISE through a voluntary tender offer announced on 27 May 2022, its extension period and acquiring shares from the market. In addition Efecte has on 19 July 2022 formally published its intention to announce a formal delisting tender offer directed at remaining shareholders of InteliWISE to tender all their shares in InteliWISE to Efecte. Purpose of the formal offer is to allow delisting of InteliWISE and consequently squeeze out the remaining shareholders regardless of the result of this formal offer.
Niilo Fredrikson, CEO of Efecte said “I am pleased to announce the success of the transaction. We help people digitalize and automate their work, and the transaction is another important step in building leading European Alternatives to global corporations in our industry. I am very excited to join the InteliWISE team in the Efecte family. Together, we are stronger than ever before. As announced, our plan is to delist InteliWISE from the stock exchange and integrate the company with Efecte. After taking over the previously submitted records, we can carry out this process.
Marcin Strzałkowski, CEO of InteliWISE said “I founded the chatbot company years ago, and today I feel enormous opportunities in the transformation of traditional services to employees, with modern conversational technologies. AI bots are remaining the key driver behind innovations in cloud computing for B2B software focused on HR and employee support. As an effect of acquisition, we expect the Efecte service management platform to get intelligence and automation features, which help it to compete with global IT goliaths. I am happy to be a part of the Efecte team now.
Financial and Legal Advisors
Sisu Partners Oy acts as the lead financial advisor and Domanski Zakrzewski Palinka (DZP) as the lead legal advisor for Efecte in connection with the transaction. The financial advisor of the InteliWISE Group in the transaction is CC Group, while the legal advisor is CDZ Chajec i Wspólnicy.
More detailed information on the transaction (in Polish) is here.
