Transaction Manager (Buy-Side) - M&A Platform

We're looking for a Transaction Manager, Buy-Side to help professional buyers acquire small businesses through our new M&A platform.

Small business owners find it hard to sell their business or buy others. Information asymmetry, lack of knowledge and low transaction amounts make it challenging. Traditional advisors shy away from serving them as they find it hard to do so profitably.

Leveraging iwoca's ability to build clean, efficient, and automated processes, combined with our deep footprint into the SME economy, trusted relationships with owners and in-depth data on their businesses give us numerous advantages to solve this problem over traditional advisors or listing platforms.

Your mission is to build and manage the buy-side of our M&A platform, connecting professional buyers with acquisition opportunities and driving deals through to completion. This is a founding team role where you'll help shape how we serve buyers in the SME M&A market.

The company

Imagine a world where every small business has the power to thrive. That's the world we're building at iwoca. Small businesses aren't just statistics – they're the heartbeat of our communities, the character of our high streets, and the engine of our economy. Since 2012, we've revolutionised how these businesses access finance, turning what was once a lengthy, frustrating process into something remarkable: funding that's fast, flexible, and actually works for modern businesses.

Our impact speaks for itself: we've provided billions in funding to more than 150,000 businesses across Europe, making us one of the continent's leading fintech innovators. But we're just getting started. Our mission? To empower one million businesses with the financial tools they deserve.

We combine cutting-edge technology and data science with genuine human understanding to make finance feel less like a barrier and more like a superpower. Whether it's managing cash flow or seizing unexpected opportunities, we ensure businesses get the funds they need – often within minutes.

The team

You’ll join the founding team building manda as a high-growth venture within iwoca.
We operate with the autonomy and pace of a startup, backed by the infrastructure, data, and credibility of a proven fintech scale-up.

You’ll work closely with the Venture Lead and our sell-side Transaction Manager as we scale toward tens of thousands of SME transactions annually.

The role

You will own the entire buy-side journey, from first contact with a professional buyer through mandate qualification, opportunity matching, negotiation, LOI, due diligence, and completion. Your task is to acquire, qualify, and convert professional and strategic buyers into active mandates and closed acquisitions.

You’ll be responsible for:-

Buyer Acquisition & Buyer Portfolio

• Building and maintaining a high-quality portfolio of professional buyers including corporates, private equity funds, family offices, and search fund operators

• Qualifying buyers early: mandate fit, sector appetite, transaction history, funding credibility, proof-of-funds signals

Mandate Shaping & Opportunity Matching

• Converting buyer criteria into structured, repeatable search mandates.

• Contributing to a matching system using valuation bands, diligence outputs, and scoring logic to allocate opportunities efficiently

Process Management & Diligence

• Driving NDA execution and structured buyer access into data rooms.

• Managing Q&A, diligence requests, document coordination, expectation alignment, and commercial issue-resolution

• Ensuring offer discipline through indicative offer templates, valuation guardrails, and clear financing intent

• Help with data room document collection and preparation for acquisition targets that you pushed.

Negotiation & Completion

• Leading negotiations to agree intelligently structured LOIs that are transparent, fair and maximise chances of success

• Staying hands-on during exclusivity and the entire due diligence

• Driving deals to completion by maintaining momentum and alignment between all parties

Platform Integrity & Compliance

• Enforcing fee attribution, non-circumvention, and process discipline to protect platform integrity and build trust
  

The requirements

• 6+ years’ experience in buy-side M&A, search funds, lower-mid-market private equity, corporate development, or tech-enabled deal platforms

• A buyer network you can draw on, with proven ability to influence diverse buyer types

• Strong financial literacy: ability to guide valuation ranges, run basic financial DD preparation, and understand acquisition financing structures

• Experience managing competitive bid processes, LOIs, and exclusivity periods

• High operational discipline and structured communication, aligned to iwoca’s service standards

• Comfortable working in an evolving environment with limited tooling and rapidly changing constraints

• Sharp commercial instincts when navigating incomplete information and maintaining deal velocity

Bonus, but not required:-

• Direct SME M&A brokerage or advisory experience, especially in high-volume owner-managed transactions

• Experience working with imperfect financial data and driving deals through commercial pragmatism

• Background in digital-enabled deal platforms or lower-mid-market corporate finance

• Understanding of SME business models, common transaction issues, and typical structures in the £500k–£10m EV range

The salary

We expect to pay a base range of £65,000 to £120,000 for this role, depending on experience.

Compensation includes a performance-linked incentive based on a fixed percentage of the transaction fees you generate. With this structure, performers typically earn total compensation between 1.5× and 2.5× base.

We're open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.

The culture

At iwoca, we prioritise a culture of learning, growth, and support, and invest in the professional development of our team members. We value thought and skill diversity, and encourage you to explore new areas of interest to help us innovate and improve our products and services.

The offices

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.

• Events and clubs, like bingo, comedy nights, football, etc.

The benefits

• Flexible working hours.

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.

• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.

• 25 days' holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.

• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.

• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.

• 3% Pension contributions on total earnings.

• An employee equity incentive scheme.

• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.

• Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.

• Two company retreats a year: we've been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• A learning and development budget for everyone.

• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.

• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.