Terms of use

The service

The Deal Network is operated by Deal Network Private Limited, Bengaluru, India. It is a private marketplace and deal workspace for approved Indian chartered accountants and company secretaries, for approved professionals across the capital structure — banks, funds, family offices, lenders, wealth managers and advisory firms — admitted after work-email verification and review, and for the counterparties they invite. Marketing pages are general information. They are not financial, legal, tax or regulatory advice. Participants remain responsible for their own professional, ethical, legal, tax and regulatory obligations.

Auditor independence under section 144 of the Companies Act, 2013 is set out in Auditor independence and Section 144.

Accounts

You must use an email address you own. Deal Network confirms that address before professional DigiLocker spend, professional approval, listing ownership or non-invitation deal access. An invited diligence vendor is treated as email-verified only when the invitation is single-use, unexpired and bound to that same address and deal.

Keep your credentials confidential. We may suspend or close an account that is rejected, abusive, or used to evade verification. Closing an account ends future access; it does not unwind completed signatures or disclosed identities.

Listings, matching and deals

Masked teasers are public to eligible professionals. Protected identity, documents and deal actions stay withheld until the product’s own gates are satisfied. An assigned Deal Network administrator may operate only a deal they are assigned to, and party-specific actions preserve the actual admin actor, represented side, reason and audit evidence.

Deal Network contacts members on WhatsApp. Besides replies and messages about your account, we send occasional news about your listings, matches, asks and the companies you know: one last message before a conversation closes, an update no more than once every two days while it is closed, and a prompt note when you are introduced to another member, all between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m. India time. An AI model writes these updates from masked facts and our code checks them before they are sent. They are information about the network, not advice or a recommendation to transact. Reply Not now to dismiss an update, or STOP to stop messages.

Pre-signing uses Deal Network’s current source-controlled instruments. Until counsel replaces those instruments, they are not a substitute for independently advised transaction documents. Definitive signing and closing happen offline and are recorded as evidence-backed dates.

Company information you share

When you tell Deal Network about a company, including its name, figures, plans or files, you confirm that you are entitled to share that information with us so we can find and introduce counterparties. You remain responsible for your own professional obligations, including confidentiality to your clients. Counterparties see only a masked description until you choose to share more.

An institution's ask may lead us to ask you about a company you know. You decide whether to put it forward and whether to share who you are; nothing that identifies the company or you reaches the institution until you do. A question or answer you relay is passed on to the other side as you wrote it, so include only what you are entitled to share. An institution must not use its ask or specifics to single out a particular company or person.

Acceptable use

Do not attempt to bypass authorization, harvest personal data, upload malware, impersonate another person, or use the service to commit fraud. Do not submit Aadhaar numbers, OTPs or other prohibited identity values into fields that do not ask for them. Restricted data must not be pasted into analytics, public pages or support emails.

Auditor independence and Section 144

You are solely responsible for ensuring that any engagement arranged or facilitated through the platform complies with section 144 of the Companies Act, 2013, the ICAI Code of Ethics and independence rules, and other applicable law. This applies to chartered accountants, firms and companies. Deal Network does not verify auditor-client relationships or conflicts, does not give legal advice, and is not liable for a participant’s breach of those rules.

A chartered accountant or audit firm that is, or will be, the statutory auditor of a company must not use the platform to offer or accept prohibited non-audit services for that company, its holding company or its subsidiary. A company must not solicit or accept those prohibited services from its statutory auditor through the platform. A service that section 144 still permits needs the Board or audit-committee approval the Act requires. ICAI independence rules may restrict a chartered accountant further.

You represent that, before you offer, solicit or accept an engagement through the platform, you will check and disclose any audit relationship that section 144 or the ICAI independence rules would restrict. If a breach is brought to our attention, we may suspend or close the account. Section 144 prohibits a company auditor from rendering these services, directly or indirectly, to the company, its holding company or its subsidiary:

• Accounting and bookkeeping.
• Internal audit.
• Design and implementation of any financial information system.
• Actuarial services.
• Investment advisory services.
• Investment banking services.
• Rendering of outsourced financial services.
• Management services.
• Any other service prescribed under section 144.

Liability

The service is provided as a coordination and evidence system. Deal Network does not guarantee a transaction will complete, a provider will remain available, or a registry result is exhaustive. ICAI’s List of Firms is a positive local index: a miss is not proof of invalid membership.

Deal Network is not liable for a participant’s breach of section 144 or ICAI independence rules; see Auditor independence and Section 144.

Changes and contact

We may update these terms as the product changes. The date at the top of this page is the current version. Questions: admin@dealnetwork.in. Deal Network Private Limited, Bengaluru, India.