How BDO France is bringing agentic AI into the everyday work of Transaction Services
Interviewed
By bringing specialised AI into financial due diligence, BDO France is helping its teams spend less time processing data and more time delivering the analysis and advice clients rely on.
Modernising Transaction Services from the inside
BDO France's Transaction Services teams support investors, companies and management teams through the decisions that shape a transaction. Their role is to understand the business behind the numbers, challenge assumptions and give stakeholders the clarity they need to make consequential decisions.
Yet, despite advances in software, the core working methods of Transaction Services have changed surprisingly little. Teams still spend a significant part of each engagement collecting documents, navigating inconsistent formats and turning raw information into something they can analyse.
BDO sees artificial intelligence as an opportunity to modernise that model, not by removing professionals from the process, but by giving them more capable tools.
“Transaction Services is fundamentally a profession of judgement and advice. The opportunity with AI is to spend less time preparing the material and more time understanding what it means for the transaction”
Thomas Bettan, Co-Head of Transaction Services at BDO
The hidden work behind every analysis
A data room rarely arrives as a clean, coherent dataset.
The information required for financial due diligence may be spread across general ledgers, contracts, payroll documents, spreadsheets and PDFs produced by different entities and systems. Before the team can investigate performance, it needs to establish what has been received, what is missing and how the available information fits together.
BDO introduced Opio to accelerate this data-room crunching. Teams can move more quickly through the available documentation, identify gaps and prepare the initial information request list. They can also structure information held in different formats, from accounting entries to contracts and payroll records, so that it becomes easier to review and interrogate.
The result is not analysis without professionals. It is a better starting point for professionals to perform that analysis.
More time for the questions that matter
When the mechanics of the data room move faster, teams can engage with the substance of the transaction earlier.
They can focus on the questions that matter: What is driving profitability? Which items are exceptional or non-recurring? What sits behind an unusual balance? Which documents are still needed to support a conclusion?
The time saved on collecting, sorting and restructuring information can be reinvested in investigating anomalies, challenging management's explanations and communicating the implications clearly.
The team remains responsible for reviewing the evidence, challenging the output and deciding what belongs in its conclusions. AI increases the team's capacity; professional judgement determines how that capacity is used.
“The value is not simply that we can process a data room faster. It is that our teams can use that time to go further in their analysis and focus on the issues that really matter to the client.”
Thomas Bettan, Co-Head of Transaction Services at BDO
Why BDO chose Opio
BDO was not looking for a general-purpose AI tool searching for a use case.
For AI to become part of a live Transaction Services engagement, it needs to understand the reality of the work: heterogeneous data rooms, granular accounting information, demanding review standards and the need to connect an analysis back to its supporting evidence.
Opio's focus on Transaction Services was therefore central to the partnership. Its team understood both the mechanics that could be accelerated and the professional responsibilities that could not be delegated.
Opio also introduced a working model suited to the next generation of Transaction Services. Professionals can assign well-defined tasks to specialised agents, provide the relevant context and review the resulting evidence. In that sense, everyone becomes a manager of agents: framing the work, setting the standard and deciding when the analysis needs to go further.
This does not mean delegating judgement. It gives professionals more capacity to exercise it. The human remains at the centre of the transaction, advising the stakeholders and taking responsibility for the conclusions.
“What differentiated Opio was its understanding of Transaction Services. The team was not bringing us a generic technology. They understood our data, our workflows and the level of scrutiny our work requires.”
Thomas Bettan, Co-Head of Transaction Services at BDO