Glossary
The vocabulary of sourcing, defined plainly.
The terms of M&A, French data and compliance you come across on TailorLead. Each in a sentence or two, no needless jargon.
M&A & origination
12 terms
- Build-up
- An external-growth strategy that consolidates several companies in the same sector around a platform. It needs a steady flow of complementary acquisition targets, which is why continuous sourcing matters.
- Business succession
- The transfer of a company to a new owner: family, employees, an industrial buyer or a financial one. The ageing of French business owners makes it a structural source of acquisition opportunities in the years ahead.
- Counterparty
- The other side of a transaction: depending on the vantage point, the potential acquirer, the seller, or the advisers who represent them. Tracking counterparties helps surface the right contacts and their deal history.
- Event signal
- An event detected on a company that can open a window of opportunity: a fundraising round, an appointment, a business succession, a new subsidiary, fast revenue growth. Reaching out at the right moment matters as much as picking the right company.
- LBOLeveraged Buy-Out
- The acquisition of a company funded mostly with debt, repaid out of the target's cash flow. The classic structure for private-equity deals on small and mid-market companies.
- Long-list
- The first broad list of potential targets that match a mandate's criteria, before filtering. It is then narrowed into a short-list as targets are qualified and prioritised.
- M&A CRM
- A relationship-management tool built for mergers and acquisitions: its data model is organised around mandates, deals and counterparties, not around the lead to account to opportunity sales funnel of a generic CRM.
- Mandate
- An engagement given to an advisory firm or investment bank to run a transaction, on the sell-side or the buy-side. The mandate sets the scope, the target criteria and the origination horizon.
- Mid-market companyETI
- A company with between 250 and 4,999 employees and revenue below 1.5 billion euros or a balance-sheet total below 2 billion (INSEE definition of an ETI). A core segment for ownership transfers and build-ups.
- Off-market sourcing
- Identifying acquisition targets that are not formally for sale, before a sell-side mandate is launched or a competitive process opens. The point is to arrive ahead of the market, on proprietary opportunities rather than deals already in circulation.
- Origination
- The work upstream of a transaction: spotting, qualifying and engaging targets or mandates before they become live deals. It is the most time-consuming, and the most differentiating, part of a deal-maker's job.
- Reachable decision-maker
- A target's decision-maker whose direct professional details (work email, phone, LinkedIn profile) are available. Without an actionable contact, a qualified target is just a name on a list.
Data & sources
11 terms
- BODACCofficial gazette of civil and commercial notices
- France's official gazette (Bulletin officiel des annonces civiles et commerciales) recording events in the life of companies: incorporations, sales and transfers of going concerns, insolvency proceedings, changes to articles of association. A public source for detecting movements in the market.
- CFNews
- A specialist media outlet and database covering mergers and acquisitions, private equity and financing in France. A source of deal signals and of the parties involved, useful for origination.
- DeepSearch
- On TailorLead, an AI search that retrieves information from licensed sources and partnerships, alongside the official registries. Results come with verifiable citations and run in the background.
- Directly wired sources
- Data fed through a direct connection to official feeds (registries, press, enrichment providers), by API, licence or open data. The origin of every data point stays traceable.
- Infogreffe
- The commercial-court registries' service that publishes data from the Trade and Companies Register (RCS): articles of association, decision-makers, filed annual accounts. Available as open data or under licence depending on the dataset.
- INPI / RNEnational business register
- A register kept by INPI (France's industrial-property office) that centralises the legal information and filed accounts of French companies. The reference source for governance, beneficial owners and official documents.
- INSEE / SIRENE
- The national register of companies and their establishments, run by INSEE (France's national statistics office). It assigns SIREN and SIRET numbers and provides the basic facts on every entity (activity, headcount, location, status).
- Ownership mappingholdings, interlocking directorships
- Reconstructing the ownership and governance links between companies and individuals: shareholding, subsidiaries, interlocking directorships and stakes. It lets you trace a target back to its beneficial owners and to the decision-makers behind a decision.
- Pay-per-contact enrichment
- A model where you pay only for the decision-maker contacts actually delivered, with no forced annual volume and no imposed minimum. Consumption is tracked in real time, with an adjustable cap.
- RCSTrade and Companies Register
- The legal register listing French traders and companies: legal form, decision-makers, registered office, share capital. Kept by the commercial-court registries, it is the reference for a company's legal status.
- SIREN / SIRET
- Identifiers assigned by INSEE to each company (SIREN, 9 digits) and to each of its establishments (SIRET, 14 digits). They serve as the key for reconciling the same company across official registries and enrichment data.
Compliance & GDPR
5 terms
- AML/CFTanti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing
- A framework of obligations requiring regulated parties to identify and verify their clients and beneficial owners. It is part of what grounds access to ownership data on the basis of legitimate interest.
- Beneficial ownerRBE
- The individual who ultimately controls a company, declared in the beneficial-ownership register (RBE). Since 31 July 2024, public access to the RBE has been restricted: consultation is granted on the basis of a legitimate interest, notably under AML/CFT obligations.
- Legitimate interest
- A GDPR legal basis allowing data processing without prior consent, where it answers a genuine interest and does not override the rights of the individuals concerned. It comes with a right to object (opt-out) that the person can exercise.
- Row-level isolationRLS, Row-Level Security
- A database partitioning mechanism that restricts each organisation to its own rows. Your criteria, your targets and your exclusions are visible only to you, with no mixing between clients.
- Sovereign hosting
- Storing and processing data on infrastructure located in France and operated locally. On TailorLead, hosting is in France (OVHcloud) and AI inference runs on a private, unexposed network. This reduces exposure to the extraterritorial reach of certain foreign laws.