Smoothing M&A Transactions for Financial Services

Our client is a $5 billion global leader in omni-commerce payments, processing over 40 billion transactions annually. The company serves more than 145 countries, manages transactions in 126 currencies and more than 300 alternative payment forms, and processes about a quarter of all U.S. credit card transactions as well as international payment processing.

However, our client was a much smaller part of a bank when the financial crisis of 2007-2008 hit. They recognized the need to divest from the bank, reduce exposure, and focus on core competencies. In 2008, they hired Centric Consulting to manage the divestiture from a leadership perspective.

Our knowledge of the unique technologies, systems and processes that financial services organizations face won us the work, but our willingness to learn about how our client operates in this competitive space earned their trust. As they continued to rely on us through 10 mergers and acquisitions (M&A) over the next decade and a half, our consultants built deep institutional knowledge of the client and their challenges.

While our physical presence at the client scaled up and down over the years, our approach remained the same: to deploy a portfolio of teaming arrangements that build true strategic partnerships and deliver the flexibility needed for intense M&A activity.

Enter Centric: Flexible Arrangements

Acquisitions are challenging for all parties, but the 24/7, “always-on” nature of financial services makes these transitions even more complex. In addition to integrating and consolidating technologies, platforms, and resources, companies must manage the changes that affect customers and employees. Because different areas will need greater or less focus at different times, flexibility is essential for any M&A team.

We delivered flexibility to our client through a strategic combination of role-based resources, solutions consulting, and ongoing operational support. For example, our role-based consulting services have proven especially valuable to companies growing through acquisitions, like our client, because our various specialists can quickly learn their environment, industry and systems.

One advantage of a role-based approach is that it delivers temporary roles, avoiding the need for layoffs after project completion. Clients also gain a team focused on execution and value delivery when each deal is complete.

At the same time, our solutions consulting approach allows us to bundle multiple expertise areas together for multifaceted, enterprise-wide projects. We drew on our functional expertise in areas like D&A, organizational change management, operational excellence, IT and financial services, project and program leadership, and business and technical analysis to:

• Develop cross-functional integration strategies and overall integration structures that align with organizational goals defined by numerous acquisitions
• Lead the platform rationalization recommendations, development of the platform strategy, and project leadership with the strategy’s execution
• Develop and execute integration and consolidation plans across 11 functional work streams:
• IT/technology
• Platform/system rationalization and consolidation
• Product development/integration
• Sales/go-to-market strategy
• Finance
• Legal/risk/underwriting
• Procurement
• Operations/call center/servicing
• Customer conversion (225k+)
• Change management
• Synergy tracking and recognition
• Lead the customer migration strategy and execution, including communication, escalations, physical migration, and success reporting
• Lead, plan and execute real estate and site strategies

In all, we have now completed more than 30 projects for our client, which have provided smoother integrations and allowed them to grow to their current size and capabilities.

The Results: Sustainable Growth

Our flexible delivery model, paired with our consultants’ deep industry and institutional knowledge, allowed us to successfully execute our client’s integrations and recognize the cost and revenue synergies supporting each deal. As we executed the defined strategies, we also provided observations and recommendations for improvement in multiple areas, including project leadership, partner implementations, and staff augmentation.

The company’s current size and market share are good proof points of our success. They have grown from a small part of a bank to an independent global payment processing powerhouse. We look forward to continuing our long relationship with our client as we help them continue to grow in their challenging sector.

Conclusion

Mergers and acquisitions are never easy. Both parties must continue seamlessly serving their customers even as complex negotiations, technology changes, process improvement, and change management work take place in the background. These challenges are especially great for financial services organizations because these 24/7 operations can never afford downtime or broken transactions. Flexible teams of experts from multiple disciplines that can scale up and down quickly can ease the transition and pave the path to success.