For owners
Selling a data business: three routes and what travels with it
Updated
Selling a data business is not always selling the company. The data can be licensed while the company trades, sold when the company closes, or go with the whole business.
Describe the data company Tell us what the company holds and sells, and whether you want to license, sell or close. We reply with the route that fits and what a buyer will ask first.
Licence the data and keep the company
A trading data company can license its dataset to a buyer for a term and keep the business. That is the route we act on as the company's agent.
Sell the records of a company that is closing
When a UK company is closing, who can sell its records depends on the stage it has reached. Its directors can sell while the company is neither being wound up nor in administration. A winding-up petition, which can come from the company, its directors or a creditor among others, puts that window at risk: if the court then makes a winding-up order, the winding up is treated as starting on the day the petition was presented, and any disposal of the company's property after that day is void unless the court orders otherwise. Once a liquidator is appointed, in a solvent members' liquidation as much as an insolvent one, the directors' powers end and the liquidator sells, and in an administration the directors need the administrator's consent. After dissolution, whatever the company still owned belongs to the Crown, so nobody at the company can sell it. A buyer of customer data in a US bankruptcy faces the conditions the FTC set out for RadioShack's customer records, among them that the buyer be bound by the privacy policies in place when the data was collected.
Sell the whole company
A sale of the whole business is what the register records, from Clarivate's purchase of ProQuest to Clearlake's of Dun & Bradstreet. We introduce an adviser for that route rather than run it.
The customer data goes with its promises
California's Civil Code treats a transfer in a merger, acquisition or bankruptcy as outside a sale only if the buyer uses the data consistently with the law, and AB 1824 makes the buyer honour opt-outs the customers gave the seller.
Source: The law on customer data when a data company is sold