Affinity Alternatives for Investment Banking and PE Teams (2026)

The best Affinity alternatives are HelmIQ for boutique and lower middle market deal execution, DealCloud for large banks and funds with an operations team, 4Degrees for a like-for-like relationship CRM, Meridian for built-in company data, and Attio for teams that want to design their own CRM. Pick the one that fixes the job Affinity leaves undone.

Disclosure and method: I built HelmIQ to run deals at my own lower middle market M&A firm, so it is one of the alternatives below. Competitor capabilities and prices come from each vendor's own website, read in September 2026, and are described the way the vendor describes them. Where a vendor's site does not mention a capability, the table says "not advertised" rather than guessing. Every HelmIQ capability named here ships in the product today. Our head-to-head HelmIQ vs Affinity comparison covers the two products feature by feature.

Already Paying for Affinity? When Leaving Makes Sense, and When It Does Not

If you renew Affinity every year and still run buyer calls, CIM reads and diligence somewhere else, you are the reader this page was written for: a sell-side boutique, lower middle market banker, independent sponsor or lean PE team that knows the people but runs the process in other tabs. The typical reader has two to fifteen deal professionals, no full-time CRM administrator, and a buyer list that lives partly in Affinity and partly in a spreadsheet.

It is less useful for three groups. Venture and growth equity investors who rarely run a formal sale process will find Affinity's relationship graph worth more than anything an execution tool adds; our guide to the best CRM for growth equity firms treats Affinity as a leading choice for them. Firms with fifty-plus deal professionals and an operations team should read our DealCloud alternatives guide instead, because their constraint is governance, not tool count. And a two-person shop that mostly needs a tidy contact list will overpay for any product here except folk or Attio.

What Is Affinity Best At?

Affinity is a relationship-intelligence CRM for private capital. Its homepage says it "captures every email, meeting, and calendar interaction across your firm automatically. No manual entry, ever." It scores relationship strength across the whole firm and shows the warmest path to any contact. No alternative on this list maps a firm's collective network as deeply, and anyone whose edge is the warm introduction should weigh that before switching.

The product has also moved on. Affinity says Ascend "preps your meetings, captures conversations, and writes updates back to your pipeline." It lists investment banking among its industries, next to private equity, venture, private credit and family offices. Its pricing page adds AI Chat, which it describes as "conversational access to your pipeline and network."

Unusually for this category, Affinity publishes its prices. The Affinity pricing page lists Essential at $2,000 per user per year, Scale at $2,300 and Advanced at $2,700, billed annually, with Enterprise on custom pricing. The detail that matters for an AI evaluation: Notetaker, AI Chat, Ascend agents and the MCP server start on Scale. Essential covers capture, relationship scoring, interaction history and pipeline tracking. Affinity also says standard onboarding, covering data import and field mapping, comes with every subscription, which is more than most quote-based vendors put in writing.

Does Affinity Have AI Agents?

Yes. Affinity Ascend is an agent platform that preps meetings, captures conversations and updates pipeline data automatically. Affinity also offers AI Chat over your pipeline and network, a Notetaker, and a hosted MCP server that, per its pricing page, lets you use Affinity data in Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants.

So the honest comparison is not "AI versus no AI." Automatic capture is table stakes across Affinity, DealCloud, 4Degrees and HelmIQ, and Affinity and HelmIQ both prep meetings. The difference is what the AI can act inside. Affinity's agents work on relationship and pipeline data. With no dialer and no data room in the product, Affinity's agents cannot place the call or stage the diligence files. AI Chat can answer questions over your pipeline and network, but CIM screening against a buy box is not marketed on Affinity's site, so if you need it, ask for it live in the demo rather than assume it is there or missing. For a network-led fund none of this matters much. For a sell-side banker working through a buyer list all day, it is most of the job.

Does Affinity's AI know what happened on your calls? Only if the call reached Affinity. An agent can summarize only what the CRM holds, and in most boutiques the call notes, buyer downloads and CIM reads never get there. Data quality is also the barrier large dealmakers name first when surveyed about AI (our roundup of AI CRMs for bankers walks through that research). That is why we think where the work gets captured matters more than which model a vendor ships.

Why Do Firms Switch From Affinity?

Firms switch from Affinity when their daily bottleneck moves from finding the relationship to running the process. Affinity answers "who do we know." A lower middle market deal team also has to dial, screen, send, track and close, and each of those steps sits in a separate tool when the CRM stops at the relationship layer.

The pressure is rising. In Axial's 2026 lower middle market outlook, 77.9% of M&A advisors said they expected to win more client engagements in 2026, against 3.9% expecting fewer. That is a sentiment survey of 107 participants, and dealmakers are optimistic about their own pipelines by trade, so treat it as expectation rather than outcome. Even half of that optimism means more mandates per banker, and more mandates is exactly where a relationship-only CRM starts to leak.

Six Mandates, Four Bankers: Where the Affinity Record Goes Quiet

Picture a four-banker sell-side shop with six live mandates and Affinity as its CRM. The numbers below are invented to show the mechanics, not drawn from a client.

• Buyer outreach. Each mandate has a buyer list of 80 to 150 names, so the firm is working roughly 700 buyer relationships at once. Calls go out through a standalone dialer, and someone copies the outcomes back into Affinity, or doesn't.
• Screening. Inbound CIMs from other bankers, for the firm's buy-side work, get summarized by an analyst in a Word doc that lives outside the CRM.
• Diligence. The data room is a separate subscription. Which buyer opened the model, and when, is known to the data room and nobody else.
• Stage tracking. A pipeline that says "IOI" does not know an IOI arrived by email yesterday unless a banker moves the card.

If each banker makes 40 buyer calls a day and 10% of the outcomes never get copied back, that is 16 missing touches a day across the firm, or roughly 320 a month. None of that is Affinity malfunctioning; it is doing the sourcing job it was designed for. The loss happens at the handoffs: the warm path, the logged call and the buyer's download become three records instead of one deal timeline, and a year in, the answer to "who engaged, when, and on what" is split across four vendors.

What to Look for in an Affinity Alternative

Before booking demos, decide which of these gaps you are trying to close. Expect it to be two or three, not all six.

• Execution tools inside the CRM. Is there a built-in dialer with call logging and voicemail drop? A data room with NDA gating? If not, you are swapping one integration project for another.
• Stages that match your process. A sell-side banker should see Origination, EL Signed, Buyer Outreach, IOI Received and LOI Received on day one, not after weeks of renaming a sales funnel.
• AI grounded in your records. Ask every vendor to generate a meeting brief, then show the source record behind each line. Fluent is easy. Cited is rare.
• Document intelligence. Can it read a CIM or teaser, score it against your buy box, and quote the page behind each point?
• Relationship depth you can live with. Nothing here matches Affinity's graph exactly. Be honest about how much of it you use each week.
• A clean way in, and a clean way out. Does the vendor have an Affinity import path, what happens to columns it does not recognize, and can you export everything if you leave?

The Best Affinity Alternatives Compared

Each row is scored on what separates a relationship tool from an execution tool. Where a cell reads "Not advertised," the vendor's site is silent on it, so ask in the demo rather than assume it is missing.

How to read it. The first three sell better data: richer relationship data, richer company data. DealCloud and Salesforce sell configurability for large firms. HelmIQ sells fewer tabs: it covers the steps after the introduction, which is the gap that sends most banking teams looking past Affinity.

The Alternatives, One by One

HelmIQ: Best for LMM Banks and Funds That Want Execution in the CRM

HelmIQ is an AI-native CRM for M&A execution. It does not try to beat Affinity at network mapping. It covers the work after the introduction.

What it does well. Connect Gmail or Outlook and HelmIQ logs email and calendar activity to the right contact and deal. For Gmail it can also backfill contacts from up to two years of past mail, so the record does not start on the day you switch. Where Affinity hands you a list to shape into a pipeline, HelmIQ ships stage templates by firm type. A sell-side bank starts with Origination, Pitched, EL Signed, Marketing Prep, Buyer Outreach, IOI Received, Mgmt Meetings, LOI Received, Exclusivity, QofE/DD and Sign & Close, and PE funds, search funds, independent sponsors, corporate development and growth equity each get their own.

The execution layer is where it parts ways with Affinity:

• A power dialer with voicemail drop, call recording (transcribed when the firm's AI features are on), a pre-call brief and automatic logging, running on your own Twilio account. The recording notice is on by default for every call, and each call log records whether notice was given.
• A data room with an NDA gate, PDF watermarking, a one-time passcode for buyers and per-buyer engagement tracking (who opened what, and when).
• CIM and teaser screening that writes a screening memo against your buy box, with each point tied to a verbatim quote from the document.
• A meeting brief emailed within the hour before each calendar meeting, with every takeaway citing the email, call or note it came from. For a first meeting with no history, it says so plainly instead of inventing context.
• Commitment tracking that reads call transcripts for follow-ups that were promised and checks whether they happened, plus a daily deal-health check that flags stalled deals.
• Stage-move proposals when an inbound email suggests a deal moved (an LOI arrived, say). The deal's own stage is only ever suggested; a banker accepts or dismisses it. Individual buyer stages inside a sell-side process can move on a hard event, such as a signed NDA, or after the firm has accepted that same buyer-stage move 30 times in a row with no undo, and every one of those moves can be undone.

One boundary to know: HelmIQ records calls placed through its own dialer and transcribes them when the firm's AI features are on. Each call bridges through the banker's phone, so Twilio bills two outbound legs per call. It does not join or record Zoom or Google Meet video meetings. Meeting notes come in by importing them from Granola or Fireflies.

Where Affinity is still better. Affinity's relationship scoring and inferred network are far deeper. HelmIQ can tell you who in your CRM works at a target company and who has been on deals with them, and it answers that from inside ChatGPT or Claude through its MCP connector, but it is not a firm-wide relationship-strength graph. If warm intros are the core of how you win, that gap is real. HelmIQ also has no SOC 2 report today (one is planned), which matters if your clients or LPs require one, and DocuSign signing is coming soon rather than available now.

Who it is not for. Venture and growth teams whose work is mostly sourcing and portfolio relationships, and large firms that need fund-level LP reporting.

DealCloud: Best for Large Banks and Established PE Funds

DealCloud, from Intapp, is the enterprise platform built for financial services, with M&A pipelines, coverage lists, and fund and LP tracking. Do not underrate its AI. The Intapp DealCloud page markets zero-entry activity capture ("Capture everything. Enter nothing."), conversational AI that answers plain-English questions from your DealCloud data, and agentic workflows with pre-built playbooks.

The trade-off is the platform around those features. DealCloud is scoped, configured and administered by the firm. Intapp publishes no implementation timeline, so get one in writing from the vendor. There is no built-in power dialer, and data rooms arrive through integrations. For a firm with twenty-plus deal professionals and an operations function, that is often the right trade. A four-person boutique should weigh who will own the admin work. We run the same exercise starting from DealCloud for teams leaving the enterprise side.

4Degrees: Best for Affinity-Style Relationship Intelligence From Another Vendor

4Degrees is a relationship-intelligence CRM for private markets. Its site names private equity, venture capital, M&A, investment banking, real estate and consulting teams. It syncs email, calendar and third-party data, scores relationship strength for introductions, and alerts you when contacts switch jobs, publish or make news. In its own comparison with DealCloud, 4Degrees describes "simple per-user, per-month pricing" with AI and a Virtual Data Room included.

If your issue with Affinity is the vendor, the interface or a specific missing signal, 4Degrees is the closest like-for-like swap. It does not change the underlying shape much, though: beyond its data room, the execution tools (calling in particular, since 4Degrees has no dialer) stay outside the CRM. The 4Degrees pricing page lists no number; it says exact pricing "depends on a few factors specific to your organization," so a cost comparison needs a quote. See where 4Degrees and HelmIQ differ.

Meridian: Best for PE Teams That Want Company Data Built In

The Meridian homepage calls the product "the AI-powered CRM and system of record for private markets," serving private equity, venture, investment banking, private credit and corporate M&A. Its differentiator is data: Meridian says it bundles 26 million company records, plus contacts, into the CRM. Its Scout agent maps target markets, suggests targets and add-ons from a firm's own history, and keeps records enriched. Meridian also says its AI extracts information from CIMs and news, and it connects to Claude and ChatGPT over MCP.

Implementation is white-glove, and Meridian says firms "launch with enhanced data in weeks." Its site does not advertise a dialer or data room, and pricing is not published. It is the strongest pick when your gap versus Affinity is company coverage rather than execution. We would not buy it expecting it to replace a sell-side process stack, and Meridian does not claim it will.

Attio: Best for Teams That Want to Build Their Own Model

Attio is one of the best-designed CRMs on the market, with a flexible data model, a fast interface and strong automations. It is popular with venture and growth firms that outgrew older tools, and it publishes its pricing, starting with a free tier. Our breakdown of what deal-team CRMs really cost puts its paid tiers next to the rest of the field.

Its AI is capable too: Ask Attio answers questions across your workspace, and a web agent pulls live research into records. It is general-purpose go-to-market AI, though, not built for M&A execution. The bigger trade-off is that Attio ships blank. It does not know what an IOI or an engagement letter is until your team builds those objects, and once they exist there is still no dialer, data room or CIM screening. Teams with a technical operator and a clear model in mind get a lot out of it. The Attio comparison goes deeper on the build-versus-buy question.

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud: Best for Firms Already on Salesforce

Salesforce can model almost any process given enough custom objects and an administrator, and a firm that already runs it may have security review and identity management solved. Its Financial Services Cloud pricing page lists per-user tiers but does not price the implementation partner most firms hire. Agentforce agents are capable, but they are general-purpose until someone designs them for your workflow; out of the box they do not screen a CIM against a buy box. Deal stages, buyer lists and mandate objects are built and maintained by an admin or a partner. Calling comes through add-ons, and there is no buyer data room. Pick it when Salesforce is already the firm's standard, not as a boutique's first CRM. The Salesforce comparison covers the admin cost.

Also Considered: folk

folk bills itself with the line "Your entire sales motion. One platform." It is aimed at sales teams, agencies, startups and partnership teams. It captures Gmail, Outlook and LinkedIn activity, offers AI assistants for research, follow-ups and recaps, and its published per-member pricing sits well below Affinity's entry seat. For a two-person shop that mostly needs a tidy relationship tracker, it is a reasonable, inexpensive choice. Its site does not address private markets or deal execution, so for a banking team it is a lighter Affinity substitute.

Which Affinity Alternative Is Cheapest?

On list price, folk and Attio are the cheapest Affinity alternatives: both publish per-seat prices well below Affinity's $2,000 per user per year entry tier. Cheapest seat is the wrong test for a deal team, though. Compare the first-year cost of everything you need to run a process, including the tools the CRM does not replace.

Year One for the Same Four Bankers: Affinity Plus a Dialer, or HelmIQ

Take the six-mandate shop from earlier and price only what it would buy to run calls and seats for a year. Seat prices are each vendor's published list price on annual billing. The usage assumption (1,500 outbound dialer minutes per banker per month) is ours and exists only to make the arithmetic concrete.

The dialer lines come from Aircall's pricing page, which puts its power dialer on the Professional plan at $50 per license per month billed annually with a three-license minimum, and PhoneBurner's pricing page, which starts at $140 per user per month billed annually. The HelmIQ usage line uses Twilio's published US voice rates: 6,000 conversation minutes a month means about 12,000 billed outbound minutes, because Twilio calls the banker's phone and then the contact, so at $0.0140 a minute that is about $168. Recording at $0.0025 a minute is $15, and four local numbers at $1.15 each is $4.60, for about $187.60 a month. Twilio also charges $0.0005 per stored recording minute per month, and stored minutes accumulate, so a year of recordings adds roughly $234 in year one. Answering-machine detection, if you turn it on, adds $0.0075 per call. A banker who dials from a SIP softphone instead of a cell phone replaces the first leg with Twilio's SIP interface rate ($0.0040 a minute), which lowers the total.

Read the result honestly. A HelmIQ seat costs more than an Affinity Scale seat, and Affinity plus a lightweight dialer comes in below HelmIQ before anyone buys a data room. The answer turns on two things: whether your team needs a heavier dialer, and what you spend on data rooms across six mandates. We do not cite a data room price because they vary too much by deal; put your own last invoice in that column. If you run one or two processes a year and your bankers make few calls, the Affinity stack may well be cheaper, and you should keep it.

One more line to model is renewal. BCG's research on bank technology spending reports that, in its project experience, the cost of many SaaS applications rises 15% or more a year, and it names "redundant tools and licenses" as a driver of waste. That comes from work with banks, not boutiques, so do not plug 15% into your model as a forecast. Treat it as a reason to ask every vendor for a written renewal cap, and to count how many overlapping subscriptions your firm renews each year.

Run this for each finalist:

DealCloud, 4Degrees and Meridian quote rather than publish, so ask each of them for a written first-year number that covers every row above.

The Records a Switch Must Not Lose

Most CRM comparisons skip this, and it is the part that can hurt. Changing CRMs is also a records decision.

If your firm is a registered broker-dealer, SEC Rule 17a-4(b)(4) requires you to keep originals of communications received and copies of communications sent "relating to its business as such" for at least three years, the first two in an easily accessible place. FINRA Rule 4511 adds a six-year default for FINRA books and records that have no other specified period. Neither rule makes a CRM your archive of record, and your compliance team, not your software vendor, decides what counts. The practical risk is simpler: a cancelled vendor can delete its copy of your history long before those clocks run out.

Many lower middle market advisors are not broker-dealers at all. Since the federal M&A broker exemption in 15 U.S.C. 78o(b)(13) took effect in March 2023, an intermediary can advise on the sale of an eligible privately held company (EBITDA under $25 million or gross revenues under $250 million) without registering, provided, among other conditions, it does not hold the funds or securities being exchanged. Those firms still face fee disputes and buyers who claim they never saw a document. The data room access log and the call history are the evidence.

Call recording adds a second line. California Penal Code 632 prohibits recording a confidential communication "without the consent of all parties," per the statute text, and state rules vary. If your new CRM records calls, find out whether the recording notice is on by default and whether each call shows it was given. This is general information, not legal advice.

HelmIQ can export an organization's full record (contacts, companies, deals, notes, call logs, email activity, data room activity and the audit log) as CSV and JSON. Ask every vendor on your list the same question before you sign, not when you leave.

How Do You Migrate From Affinity to Another CRM?

Migrating off Affinity means exporting your lists to CSV, importing them with a column mapping you review, reconnecting mailboxes so interaction history rebuilds, and running both systems in parallel for a short window. For a boutique, the import itself can fit in an afternoon; plan a week or two for the parallel run.

Step 1: Inventory what lives in Affinity. List every Person, Organization and deal or opportunity list your team actually uses. Note the custom columns (sector, buy-box fit, owner, source) and which ones people filter on. Dead lists do not need to move, but they may still need to be kept (see the records section above).

Step 2: Export each list. In Affinity, open the list, use its menu to export to CSV, and save one file per list. Keep the originals unedited as your backup and your retention copy.

Or skip the CSV round-trip. HelmIQ also connects to Affinity directly with an API key (Settings, Integrations, External CRMs) and pulls people into contacts, organizations into companies and opportunities into deals, along with notes. Use the steps below if you prefer to review each list as a file.

Step 3: Import with a vendor preset. In HelmIQ, pick the Affinity preset on the import screen. It recognizes Affinity's column names (person first and last name, email, phone, title, organization, LinkedIn) and maps them for you: Person lists land as contacts, Organization lists as companies. HelmIQ also fingerprints file headers to detect the source vendor, and an AI column mapper handles columns no preset knows. Anything that does not match a standard field is kept as a custom field under its original header, so nothing is silently dropped. Opportunity or deal lists go through the separate deals import rather than the Affinity contact preset. There, stage labels are normalized, deals marked Passed or Declined import as passed rather than live, and anything unrecognized lands in an early stage for you to re-slot.

Step 4: Rebuild interaction history from the source. A list export carries list columns, not the full email trail. Connect Gmail and HelmIQ can walk back through up to two years of past mail (twelve months by default) and create contacts from it, filtering out newsletters, bulk mail and automated senders. Outlook mailboxes sync going forward from the day you connect them. To bring over the email trail itself, upload a Gmail Takeout (mbox) export, which HelmIQ imports as dated email history against matching contacts.

Step 5: Verify before you cut over.

• Row counts match per list (contacts, companies, deals)
• Ten random contacts have the right email, company and title
• Every live deal sits in the right stage of the new template
• Passed deals did not come back as live
• The custom columns you filter on came across on the record
• A test meeting produces a brief that cites real records
• Owners and deal teams are assigned correctly

Step 6: Run in parallel, then retire. Keep Affinity read-only for a week or two while the team works in the new system. Cancel at your renewal date, not before, since Affinity bills annually, and take a final full export on the way out.

How Much of This Affinity Comparison Is Vendor Claim

Almost every capability cell above is a vendor describing itself, so read the comparison as a map of what to verify in a demo, not as a test result. The sources break down this way:

• Vendor pages (Affinity, Intapp, 4Degrees, Meridian, Attio, Salesforce, folk, Aircall, PhoneBurner, Twilio) support only what each vendor says about its own product and list price, read in September 2026. Pricing pages change without notice, and none of them tells you what a firm actually paid after discounts.
• Axial's outlook is a sentiment survey of 107 lower middle market participants. It measures expectation, not deals closed.
• BCG's 15% SaaS cost figure comes from its project work with banks, not from a survey, and not from boutiques.
• The statutes and rules (17a-4, FINRA 4511, the M&A broker exemption, California Penal Code 632) say what the text requires. How they apply to your firm is a question for counsel.

Everything else is our judgment: why banking teams leave Affinity, the four-banker numbers (assumptions, not client data), and the fit rankings themselves. We built one of the products ranked, so weigh those judgments accordingly and run the demo test below yourself.

Checklist: Your Affinity Alternative Scorecard

Copy this into a doc and score each finalist 0 (no), 1 (partly, or via an add-on) or 2 (yes, shown live in the demo). A vendor gets credit only for what it showed you, not what it said.

Execution

• Places a call from the deal record and logs the outcome without copy-paste
• Records calls with a recording notice on by default, and shows per call whether notice was given
• Runs a data room with an NDA gate, watermarking and per-buyer access logs
• Screens a real CIM against your buy box and quotes the page behind each point

AI you can check

• Produces a meeting brief where every line links to a source record
• Says "no history" for a first meeting instead of inventing context
• Proposes stage changes for a banker to approve rather than moving deals on its own

Relationship depth

• Shows who at your firm knows someone at a target company
• Rebuilds email history from your mailboxes, not just from list exports

Data in and out

• Imports an Affinity CSV and keeps unrecognized columns under their original headers
• Exports your full record (including call logs and data room activity) on request
• Puts the renewal cap and data deletion terms in writing

Cost

• Written first-year number covering seats, dialer, usage, data room, implementation and admin

Our rule of thumb: a finalist that scores below 60% of the possible points on the rows matching your bottleneck probably does not fix the problem that sent you looking.

How to Choose

Match the option to the bottleneck you actually have:

One test works on every vendor. Ask for a live walk through a single deal day: an inbound CIM screened against your buy box, a buyer call placed and logged, a follow-up drafted, a data room invite sent, and the deal moved when the IOI lands. Every time the demo switches to another tab, you have found your next integration.

For a view that does not start from Affinity, our investment banking CRM buyer's guide ranks the full field, including Navatar and HubSpot.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does 4Degrees compare to Affinity? Both are relationship-intelligence CRMs for private markets. Each syncs email and calendar, scores relationship strength, helps find warm introductions and supports deal pipelines. Affinity publishes its pricing and markets Ascend agents; 4Degrees quotes pricing and leans on relationship signals such as job-change and news alerts. Neither includes a dialer. Affinity has no data room, while 4Degrees says a virtual data room is included in its per-user pricing.

Is Affinity a good CRM for an investment bank? For relationship mapping, yes, and Affinity lists investment banking among the industries it serves. For running sell-side processes it is thinner, so a bank that runs its own processes ends up adding tools for calling, diligence and screening.

Can a firm run Affinity and a deal-execution CRM side by side? Yes, and some do: Affinity for network mapping, an execution CRM for live mandates. The cost is two systems of record. Set one rule on day one (for example, the deal and every buyer interaction live in the execution CRM) or the two will drift apart within a quarter.

What happens to Affinity's relationship-strength column when I import? It comes across as a custom field under its original header, so the value you exported stays on the record. HelmIQ does not recompute Affinity's score after the move, so treat it as a snapshot from the day you exported, not a live signal.

Next Step

Pull last month's call log, your data room invoices and your Affinity renewal date, then score two finalists against the checklist above with your own numbers in place of our illustrative ones. If the execution rows are where you lose points, request access to HelmIQ; once you are approved, the import is self-serve, so you can load your Affinity export and run the deal-day test on your own data before you decide anything.

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