and data with blockchain with the UCID service. Now with Deal Box, TNS is applying these emerging technologies to enhance trust, transform the investment due diligence process, accelerate access to capital and unlock innovation. By applying the same cutting-edge technology and methodologies as EMMA to secure devices and data, TNS is now collaborating with Deal Box to extend the applications of these technologies to the investment capital industry by securing digital assets and documents.

Reducing friction from due diligence

To accelerate access to capital, it’s important to first understand the challenges of the traditional investment due diligence process. It involves preparing due diligence documents, financials, corporate governance, and legal filings. With an 80-point document checklist, 30 or more individual documents, and the necessity of meeting regulatory compliance requirements, preparation is rigorous. To add complexity, multiple parties need visibility into and access to various documents, many with highly sensitive contents. Ultimately, successfully preparing for and navigating the due diligence process builds trust between prospective investors and the companies that will be able to accelerate innovation with their investment.

Trust was once built on the bedrock of physical and personal human relationships, where a simple handshake would do. In an increasingly virtual world though, establishing trust can be elusive and difficult—and the friction of the due diligence process can hamper it. What’s needed is a democratization of funding to build trust for all parties involved—faster and more easily. The process is an ideal application for the blockchain, a distributed ledger shared with the nodes of a computer network to guarantee cross-network security and fidelity of a record and data.

Blockchain and UCID for due diligence at Deal Box

Deal Box is the creator of Investment Packaging, a fundraising process designed to consolidate the disparate resources in the capitalization value chain. Through it, Deal Box brings together everything companies need to be investor-worthy in one package: pro forma valuation and financial models, automated legal filings, corporate governance and data room set-up, and an offering portal with reporting and analytics. Founded in 2005, Deal Box has over 500 packaged clients with more than $200 million in deal flow.

Now with TNS, Deal Box is enhancing and transforming the due diligence process by bringing key aspects on-chain. This is critical in our shift to a virtual world, as the financial network must keep up with ever-higher levels of data protection and identity security. By leveraging the blockchain and the Universal Communications Identifier (UCID), a unique identifier for a device—or in this case any digital asset—on a network, Deal Box’s process can verify documents, ensure regulatory compliance, and provide a high level of cross-network security for sensitive documents without revealing the contents. It’s a transformational step toward redefining capital markets and accelerating innovation. UCID is a solution for securing physical and digital assets. It’s similar to radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, which encodes digital data in tags or smart labels captured by a reader via radio waves and stored in a database. UCID goes beyond RFID in applications for tracking virtual assets and amplifying security by putting this process onto a permissioned blockchain.

Creating programmable trust

UCID has very specific applications and advantages for enhancing the due diligence process. These include document provenance and pedigree. Provenance concerns who created the document, who has seen it, and where it has been. Pedigree is about quality—accuracy, completeness, and compliance with regulatory standards, ultimately influencing the trustworthiness of document contents. Implementing UCID and bringing it onto the blockchain amplifies the provenance and pedigree of the documents by