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Mainberg: Digitalising Investment Portfolio Management and Research Collaboration

Financial Portfolio Management and AI-driven deal research with Power Apps, Power BI, and Microsoft 365.

Mainberg Asset Management GmbH

Mainberg Asset Management is a special‑situations hedge fund headquartered in Germany. Its Mainberg Special Situations UCITS fund, launched in January 2019, has delivered a five‑year track record and has been awarded The Hedge Fund Journal’s UCITS Hedge award for Best Performing Fund in the European Special Situations category. Mainberg’s strategy focuses on corporate M&A deals—both back‑end and front‑end transactions—and emphasises a safety‑first mentality that seeks predictable 6‑8 percent returns. The co‑founders, Rudolf Ferscha and Dr Robert Hillmann, carefully select deals and avoid politically sensitive or high‑risk transactions. As a result, Mainberg’s success is built on rigorous research and disciplined risk management

Location:

Frankfurt, Deutschland

Employees:

10+

Woods Business Solutions hat uns einen klaren, standardbasierten Weg auf der Microsoft Cloud aufgezeigt und die notwendige Transparenz über Projekte geschaffen.

Dr. Robert Hillmann, Geschäftsführer, Mainberg Asset Management GmbH

Starting Point
Despite their strong investment performance, Mainberg’s internal processes for managing deal information and research were fragmented. Investment analysts tracked potential deals, due‑diligence documents and regulatory updates in multiple Excel spreadsheets and shared drives. Portfolio managers performed cash‑flow analysis and scenario modelling in separate files. Important documents such as legal opinions, M&A agreements and research notes were stored in email attachments or individual desktops. As the fund expanded into more geographies and began managing more complex deal structures, these practices created several challenges:

Summary

  • Limited transparency across deals and portfolios – portfolio managers had no single view of all back‑end and front‑end positions, making it hard to understand exposure across regions, sectors and risk types.

  • Manual reporting and data consolidation – generating reports for the investment committee required analysts to manually aggregate data from spreadsheets and emails, increasing the risk of errors and delaying decision‑making.

  • Collaboration bottlenecks – research teams found it difficult to share due‑diligence documents, regulatory updates and investor communications because information was scattered across systems.

  • Compliance and audit pressure – regulators required reliable audit trails for each investment decision. Without a centralised platform, retrieving supporting documents during audits was time‑consuming.

Mainberg wanted to modernise its technology stack to support growth and maintain its competitive edge.

Summary

  • Centralise deal and portfolio data into a single platform that supports the entire investment life cycle—from sourcing and due diligence to execution and monitoring.

  • Streamline reporting so that management could quickly understand portfolio exposure, risk metrics, cash‑flow projections and performance, and act on opportunities and risks.

  • Improve collaboration and knowledge management across research, legal and compliance teams, ensuring that key documents and communication are easily accessible and linked to the relevant deals.

  • Ensure compliance and audit readiness by keeping comprehensive records of investment rationales, approvals and supporting documents.

Solution Overview

The implemented solution is built on Microsoft 365 and combines SharePoint-based knowledge grounding with a dedicated Deal Research Agent for Mainberg’s merger-arbitrage workflow. SharePoint serves as the central repository for deal documents and supporting materials, while the agent is designed to search those files and return structured answers instead of forcing analysts to work through multiple sources manually.

At the core of the solution is a structured first-pass analysis aligned to Mainberg’s existing Anlagevorschlag template. The first task of the agent is to generate the recurring deal-description fields—such as announcement date, transaction type, premium, irrevocables, board recommendation, break-up fee, and expected closing—so the output can be reused directly in the investment memo and materially reduce manual preparation effort.

The solution is further enhanced by a lessons-learned and regulatory-risk knowledge layer. Because Mainberg’s process is driven primarily by transaction structure and the likelihood that a deal will close, the concept includes a categorized database of prior cases and a country-level regulatory knowledge source, enabling the team to compare new opportunities with previous transactions and assess approval risks more systematically.

On top of this foundation, a monitoring layer is planned for active deals and ongoing news. Mainberg described the need to follow roughly 20 live merger-arbitrage cases and reduce the manual effort of checking websites and updates each week, so the target solution is designed to surface relevant changes faster, shorten analysis time, and support quicker portfolio decisions across the investment process.

With Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and a dedicated Deal Research Agent, Mainberg is building a connected digital foundation that structures first-pass deal analysis, reduces manual research effort, and supports faster, more informed merger-arbitrage decisions.

Results

The implementation gave Krämmel a centralized digital foundation for managing development projects, portfolio data, and reporting more consistently. By connecting Power Apps, Power BI, and Microsoft 365, project information became easier to access, evaluate, and act on across teams.

Centralized project and portfolio data

One connected platform for development projects, reporting, and collaboration.

10

hours/month

Estimated time saved through centralized reporting and less manual consolidation

Faster access to project and portfolio information through one centralized platform

20-30%

Estimated reduction in time spent preparing management overviews

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