Post-M&A Integration for a Global Financial Organization

Services:

M&A Integration

Industry:

Financial Services

Location:

Canada

Client since:

2015

Our client is one of the top 10 banks in the world by market capitalization, with over 90,000 employees. We have been working with the client’s wealth management division, which employs more than 6,000 client-facing advisors.

The Client acquired the banking operations of another global financial organization in North America. As a result of this merger, our client needed to synchronize processes for over 500,000 new clients and up to 5,000 employees.

Business Challenge

Difficulty integrating wealth management software systems

Our client had to extract all client and employee data from the acquired financial organization and place it on the client’s technology stack. Since the data on the acquired company side changes daily, an ongoing scheduled migration pipeline had to be applied. For clean integration and a seamless tech transition, they engaged the Sombra team to deal with the wealth management branch, as they also needed to merge the data on investment funds native to both financial organizations.

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Agreed on sharing responsibilities with the Client

The Sombra team suggested a dedicated development team for the Client. This engagement model implies that both parties are sharing responsibilities as follows:

Client

Establishes and manages priorities.
Defines and drives milestones for the project.
Increases or decreases the project scope during our cooperation.

Sombra

Manages the development team to achieve defined goals.
Keeps the Client informed about team progress through recurrent syncs.

Solution

Since the client had a tight deadline of three months for this particular integration, as well as other non-functional requirements in terms of security, scalability, and reliability, we’ve applied the following solutions:

Given that the file processing took nearly 5 minutes and the existing tech stack based on Java and Spring, we decided to encapsulate business logic in Spring Cloud Task, which also provides out-of-box features like built-in monitoring, scalability, and error handling.
To handle comprehensive task scheduling, we used the Quartz framework.
An in-house SFTP solution met the security and regulation requirements for in and out file transfers.
AWS S3 was added as a data and logs alternative destination to meet the availability and observability requirements.
Several levels of testing proved the reliability of the solution:
- Smoke testing
- Regression testing
- Integration testing
- Boundary value data testing

Tech stack:

Dev: Java, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud Task, Quartz, MSSQL Server

QA: qTest, Postman

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Business Value

Thanks to the efforts of our team, the Client has achieved 30% of expected synergies in 6 months after the closing ahead of the targeted number of 25%. On an annualized basis, run-rate savings will equal 55% of the stated target. Such a track record flourishes the Client’s growth and increases confidence during the following acquisitions.