Finance Monthly - October 2022

Finance Monthly. 22 Bus i ne s s & Economy The devil’s in the data One of the biggest challenges is the integration of organisations’ systems and processes after a merger or acquisition is completed. Bringing two businesses together and combining or replacing methods of working, information and technologies is a timeconsuming and difficult process which can take months or even years of hard work before the benefits are realised. This is especially true when it comes to integrating data. Businesses hold important information, such as customer account history, prior billing and invoicing information, which has to be integrated if the acquiring or newly formed firm wants to continue to offer these clients the service they expect. Yet getting access to this information, ensuring its integrity, andmapping it into a new data structure can be a monumental task, particularly if the two companies have different data and/or business models. If the integration of this customer data is not approached properly, the new or acquiring business risks harming the quality of service that their newly gained customers usually expect, which could lead to them leaving for another provider. At the same time, if an ineffective cost structure is put in place post-merger or acquisition, this will make it harder to achieve the synergies anticipated from the initial deal, costing revenue and not producing the returns for the board and shareholders that were originally promised or forecasted. If businesses want to merge data such as customer billing and invoicing information from two separate companies effectively and quickly, they need to harness tools which can manage the extraction and loading of data into the solution of choice. At the same time, they require solutions that have the ability to collect, deduplicate, consolidate, convert and route the information, matching records where possible and creating new accounts where necessary. However, bringing in a range of new platforms and technologies, or relying on legacy solutions already in place, to merge and manage customer data risks complicating the matter further and, as such, firms should be looking for a single solution they can implement which can easily integrate and run these processes, from data extraction through to creating new accounts.

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