Ask why an announced deal has not closed and the answer is rarely financing. It is almost always a regulator: a merger control review in phase two, a foreign investment screening that restarted its clock, a sector authority with its own opinion. The regulatory path is the timeline, and the timeline is most of the spread.
Merger control asks whether the combination harms competition. Most regimes run a short phase one (weeks) with a long phase two (months) for the problematic cases, and the clock stops whenever the authority asks for more information. Foreign investment screening (FDI) asks who the buyer is. It has spread across Europe rapidly, the filings are often mandatory and suspensory, and the timelines are less predictable than merger control's.
The same transaction can be notifiable in one jurisdiction on turnover thresholds, in another on market share, and in a third because the target holds an asset the FDI regime considers critical. Each filing has its own deadlines, standstill obligations and precedents. Pricing a spread without knowing the filing set is guessing.
Most desks keep this knowledge in memos and memory. It is better as structured data: regimes with their thresholds and clocks, authorities with their precedents, and a per-deal assessment that links them. That is how FPM models it, with 221 authorities and 103 merger control and FDI regimes pre-mapped and precedent cases linked per situation. The merger arbitrage software page shows where the regulatory view sits in the workflow, and the assessment tour covers how a deal's filing set turns into a risk score your investment committee can interrogate.
Let us walk through your current deal workflow, data sources, and regulatory coverage together, and identify where FPM creates immediate value.