How FT Partners Is Transforming Deal Work with Model ML

About FT Partners

FT Partners is the world’s leading fintech investment bank, providing strategic and financial advisory services to companies across the sector. Led by founder Steve McLaughlin, its team has advised on some of the largest fintech transactions in history.

The firm has offices in New York, London and San Francisco, and was recently named Dealmaker of the Year and Investment Banking Firm of the Year by The M&A Advisor.

The Challenge

At FT Partners, some of the most im

portant work on a deal also used to be the slowest. Tasks behind a client transaction could take the firm's bankers an entire weekend, and the most complex work took far longer.

Cap tables were a clear example. "Clients would send us complicated cap tables and all the legal documents behind them. It could take a week to put together, and even then there'd be errors,” says Steve McLaughlin, Founder and CEO of FT Partners. For a firm advising fintech companies on their most important transactions, this was an issue they couldn’t afford to have.

To get this work done faster and without errors, FT Partners looked at general-purpose AI tools, like those from the frontier labs. But the firm wanted a partner built specifically for finance, and found that in Model ML.

The Solution

FT Partners partnered with Model ML on a firmwide rollout. Since then, the pace of the firm's deal work has changed significantly. "Things that used to take us an entire weekend can now be done in half an hour to an hour,” Steve says.

Cap tables show what that looks like in practice. Where bankers once spent up to a week assembling one by hand, they now put a client's legal documents into Model ML and get back a first version built straight from the source. The same is true of long-form work. When Steve asked Model ML for a 30-page report built to his own structure, it came back in around six minutes with all the answers he needed.

That breadth has made Model ML part of how the whole firm works. "It's really something that's being used at every single level of our company by almost every single employee," Steve says. "People are living in the product."

Impact

Today, 70% of Model ML users at the firm are in the product every day, and weekly retention is above 90%. On average, each user is saving more than 20 hours per week, and usage is still growing, with average minutes per user doubling in the last six weeks alone.

What matters most is what those hours make possible. Steve McLaughlin believes Model ML could speed up FT Partners' deal work by 50%, allowing the firm to take on twice as many deals and, ultimately, to find and win better ones. Over time, he sees that doubling the firm's revenues without adding any cost.

"Honestly, I could not be happier with the team and the progress you guys have made. It's been incredible. I'm pretty blown away with what we're doing together. We're just scratching the surface," said Steve McLaughlin, Founder & CEO of FT Partners.