Unlocking Tech System Gridlock after FinServ M&A

Gridlock after M&A

Two mid-size banks coming together can create a regional powerhouse on paper, but it likely also can be gritty and complicated once the IT teams reveal what’s under the hood– a maze of infrastructure carefully maintained over years, held up by tenuous and undocumented operational processes, while vulnerable to regulatory compliance issues. That’s when the real work begins.

Running Parallel Infrastructure

Merging back-end systems and retiring redundancies, all while implementing refreshed workflows designed to support the vision of the newly combined entity is rarely the choice work for in-house engineering teams. Complicated technically and sometimes politically sensitive– no one wants to touch the proverbial plumbing but it’s the systems and infrastructure level operating at full efficiency that will determine whether a deal was the right move many years down the line.

To get there– this regional bank brought in EASL’s Platform to begin running and validating data across both architectures under a ‘parallel integration approach’ which ensured business continuity within each separate environment, while the testing of the new envisioned planned for the combined infrastructure began show it could hold water and run without errors or disruption. This kind of data assurance is critical to any major transition.

Full Confidence in your Data Infrastructure

The EASL Platform enabled the respective teams to build dynamic governance around a shared data ontology, mapping multiple many-to-one data movement configurations to begin to streamline and test the data integrity across all data systems from the legacy core to the newly combined environments. This provided “an unparalleled data canvas” for the executives and operators to ensure all the mapping, testing, validation, and auditing was fully working and in compliance with the regulatory policies built into the EASL rules engine, operated by the client's DevOps team.

This kind of design, experimentation, testing, and then deployment of new data infrastructure, fit for purpose around the KPIs of the combined banking entities was completed within 39 days (versus the 9+ months envisioned). The parallel system operating approach enabled businesses to continue with zero disruption until there was consensus and confidence to cut over to the newly redesigned architecture strategy. Further, all the potential technical debt that could have been from messy manual code base data extraction was completely avoided as a critical risk, due to the utilization of EASL as the core platform infrastructure powering the process from design into production and ongoing operational phase.

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