Choosing adequate code names for a corporate finance document is a long cherished City tradition. This makes good sense, all companies are referred to only by their code name until close to finalisation, establishing a layer of security which ensures that any casual observer, perhaps looking over your shoulder on a train, has no way of knowing who is buying who, or perhaps which business will shortly be floated on AIM.
And let’s be honest, there is no question that the choosing of said names is a sport often enjoyed – when else do advisors get to show off the benefits of a classical education by naming all parties after Gods from Greek mythology?
So far so good it would appear, a bit of humour at the start of the transaction and then down to the serious business of making the deal happen.
However, for the printer the fun – for want of a better term – often starts to wane towards the end of the deal when decoding takes place.
Decoding is generally part of an overnight proof stage carried out firstly by the typesetter who undertakes a page by page global search for the code words which are then checked by a separate reader.
Easy, just the push of a button? Sadly not. I remember for example a Project Avid, sounds okay but one of the directors was called David and the auto search kept changing his name to that of the company; we had a Project Church, but it transpired that one of the company’s sites was on Church Street – that one nearly slipped through.
Merely selecting codenames with different numbers of letters to the actual subject can also cause problems: two letters longer may not seem a big deal but when it extends lines, which in turn leads to a longer paragraph and then at 2.30 in the morning, when you are finally ready to press the button to print, only to notice that your previously beautifully balanced document now contains a page in the middle containing only a couple of words!
And then there’s the story of the Italian wine. A few years ago we were typesetting a job involving a number of different companies all of which were coded after different bottles of Italian wine, so Acme Manufacturing was Chianti Manufacturing and Noname PLC was Amarone PLC, you get the picture. All went well until the final decode, when we of course discovered that a Chianti share now became an Acme share – and such was technology at the time that the only way to check all of those was manually.
Our readers found 138 of the offending words scattered throughout the document and a very tired client re-checked them all. This particular client now has an in house rule that all code names must:
a) Start with the same letter as the name it is replacing
b) Be of the same number of letters.
Life, or final checking at any rate, would prove that little bit easier for all of us if everyone adopted this creed.
