To succeed, a merger requires the smooth integration of IT systems and services, but the task often plunges the CFO responsible for ensuring the savings into uncharted territory. Confronted by an immediate technical challenge, companies typically choose one of two questionable routes. Some, fearing costs and complexity, never fully integrate their acquisition's systems and thus gain few synergies. Others focus on the promise of synergy gains and improved performance but, in their haste, simply choose one system over another, often alienating both customers and employees.

CFOs might consider looking to IT integration in the banking sector for guidelines that can provide a better approach in other sectors. IT, underlying every process a bank performs, is particularly integral to bank operations. Moreover, banks tend to have complex operational structures, often with many brands, branches, and product sets.¹ Yet even amid that complexity, it is possible to structure an approach that taps synergies,² serves customers at least as well as they were served before, and achieves suitable trade-offs among internal parties.

To merge these structures for maximal synergy and minimal customer disruption, it is necessary to transform the IT functions that underpin them. We have found that this process...