CORE/Banneker Partners
CORE Business Technologies is a fintech leader in Enterprise Revenue Management and Payments for Health Care, Government, Higher Education and Utilities. In the Health Care and Government sectors in particular, CORE built a who’s who list of customers over its 20+ year history based on the competitive superiority of its solution. Recurring revenue exceeded 75% of total and retention rates exceeded 95%. Profit rates were high and growing, yet the sales and customer service force was small compared to the market landscape and new investments were needed to bolster growth.
Management had very successfully bootstrapped the company, but were keen to divest for retirement planning purposes while freeing up CORE’s operational management to grow the company faster. Stratagem entered to represent this mid-cap company to both strategic and PE buyers. In addition to marketing CORE to a breadth of prospects, Stratagem mined CORE’s legacy accounting system to provide CORE management and potential buyers granular reports regarding recurring revenue and retention rate trends by customer and vertical. Without such data, potential buyers would have been relatively blind as to key dynamics benefiting CORE and boosting its value. Once a deal was struck in the form of an LOI, Stratagem remained on the front line during all negotiations and the closing.
Before Stratagem’s introduction, CORE and Banneker were unknown to each other, but Banneker proved to be an excellent fit based on Banneker’s ardent interest in enterprise and payment solutions for CORE’s verticals. Banneker now has the platform to considerably grow CORE’s sales and customer service force, funded by healthy, predictable cash flows and also to acquire adjacent solutions to expand the offering. As of March 2021, CORE has announced three completed add-on acquisitions and significantly hired staff.
“Stratagem’s considerable time investment to learn and understand our business, helped guide us from pre-sale presentations, to extended steps in diligence through closing. Stratagem’s perseverance, financial acumen and strong partnership with the management team resulted in a new opportunity that offers a bright future for our employees and partners
— Mark Cohen, President
CORE Business Technologies