Changing attitudes detected as market starts upward climb

EXPO Real 2024 provided a measure of how far the market has come in a year, according to Drooms’ CEO Alexandre Grellier.

“Last year they were in a pretty depressed mood, people were really not happy, and it was very difficult to get the right meetings. So this has completely changed,” Grellier told Real Asset Media’s Richard Betts.

“It’s a little bit of the light at the end of the tunnel. We now have deals coming up again where people seem to have found their baseline, so this is really good.”

Grellier said that the improvement is also evident in his own firm’s performance. “If we compare September last year to September this year we have growth in demand of around 17.5% which shows that we’re not back where we were, but things are coming back slightly.”

Technology, data, innovation and AI were big topics at EXPO this year.

“It’s the first time in more than 20 years that I had people coming to me telling me that they have ideas about how to use our product in a different way,” Grellier said.

He explained that clients are looking at their processes and changing them because they do not believe that continuing as they did previously is good enough.

The Drooms product is changing too and the company recently launched a chat function.

“We started first with our virtual data room business that was designed to provide a platform for people to securely exchange documents and information and to enable them to understand the risks and opportunities in a portfolio.”

“The demand has increased and people need to communicate. You have a variety of tools in the market such as WhatsApp.  But is that something you would use in a professional environment? We thought we needed to bring a communication tool to the market which doesn’t necessarily need to be connected to the data room, where you can communicate in full security and be completely GDPR compliant. That is what we are bringing to the market.”

Grellier said the first feedback is very positive because there’s no risk if clients want to communicate outside company boundaries. “It needs to be chatting made easy, it’s chatting made secure and GDPR compliant for people in a professional environment.”

Grellier explained that to be GDPR compliant data cannot be stored on American servers.

“We have our own servers in a very highly secure server farm with three times redundancy,” he explained.

Security has become a bigger topic. “We’re living in unsecure and difficult times so it has become more and more important to have a safe harbour where you can put your stuff and where you know that it is treated in the way it has to be treated because it’s sensitive, confidential data.”

Drooms started with a translation tool for doing deals internationally. It now provides analysis tools that extract information from documents. “This is where we start using AI more and more. We’ve been using it for over eight years. That’s a long time working and experiencing AI.”

Now ESG is further increasing demand for this type of tool because there is a need to obtain data to supply other systems and there is also a growing need to assess the risks in portfolios, Grellier explained.