The work that begins after an acquisition closes

The mechanics of acquiring a book of business are well rehearsed. Valuation, diligence, negotiation, completion. By the time a deal closes, both sides have usually done this before and know what to expect. The part that goes less smoothly, and that attracts far less attention, is everything that has to happen afterwards to make the acquired clients genuinely part of the buying firm.

An acquired book arrives with its own CRM, its own filing conventions, and its own gaps. Records do not map cleanly onto the buyer's systems. Suitability documentation is patchy. Risk profiles are out of date. Until that is sorted out, the firm is operating a book it does not fully understand, to a standard it cannot yet evidence, which is precisely the situation a regulator is least sympathetic to.

Why it gets underestimated

Integration is underestimated for a simple reason: it is invisible in the deal model. The price, the multiple, and the expected synergies all sit on a spreadsheet. The months of unglamorous data work required to realise them do not. So firms that are rigorous about diligence are often surprisingly casual about what comes next, and discover the cost only once the book is theirs.

There is no clever shortcut around this, which is perhaps why it is so often skipped over. The firms that handle it well are mostly the ones that take it seriously in advance, treating integration as a defined piece of work with an owner and a plan rather than something operations will somehow absorb. That is not a sophisticated insight. It is just an easy one to ignore when the deal itself is the exciting part.

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