Merger & Acquisition and Integration Readiness Assessment

Full-service financial institution poised to expand its distribution network

Business Challenge
A well-respected financial services institution operating more than 1,100 banking branches in the Midwest and Southeast, as well as providing consumer and business banking services, ATM, foreign exchange trading and other financial products, was looking to invest in and expand its distribution network. In order to achieve that organic growth, it needed to enhance its risk management process to be ready for increased acquisition activity.

To prepare for the challenges of acquisition activity, the bank formed a Risk Management Division that worked with bank staff and business units to create a five-phased approach for acquisitions: due diligence, target environment design, conversion planning & development, conversion execution and post implementation. While the division was able to complete detailed due diligence phase, it did not have the dedicated staff to focus on environment design, conversion planning and development and preparing for implementation. Executive Management determined that organization needed to a repeatable, sustainable process for acquiring and integrating organizations into its network and chose DeLeeuw Associates to accelerate the process for them.

DeLeeuw Solution
DeLeeuw Associates worked with the bank to gain an understanding of the bank's key objectives. DeLeeuw utilized its best practices integration and conversion process, enhanced over nearly two decades of experience. DeLeeuw, working with bank staff, mapped its best practices Integration Playbook against the bank's phased approach for acquisitions. Leveraging what was working well for the bank, DeLeeuw customized a complete acquisition readiness and integration plan.

DeLeeuw worked with staff and business units to gain a better understanding of each phase of the acquisition process, as well as collect artifacts from prior acquisitions and catalog them into the appropriate acquisition phase. Then a gap analysis — focused on cross-functional processes and deliverables — was completed to identify potential impacts to a successful acquisition. This provided the bank the ability prioritize what gap opportunities they would address based on the risk level that they defined. In addition, conversion and integration work plans were developed and customized for bank-specific work categories.

In addition to customizing these plans, DeLeeuw developed an MIS reporting process that would provide a status of overall acquisition progress, along with views by department, division and line of business. This also included issue management and gap tracking processes to facilitate effective risk management.

Return on Investment
DeLeeuw's interview and artifact cataloguing process started to socialize the bank's five-phase integration and conversion process universally across the organization, giving participants a more in-depth understanding of the work break down and the deliverables by phase for their unit. This also broadened the thought process for the next acquisition to allow the organization to institute best practices. Finally, the bank gained an immediate framework for both current merger activities as well as future acquisitions, and the ability to easily identify specific areas that might need attention to meet deadlines with a proven, repeatable process for enhancing and expanding its distribution network.

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