Interim Chief Integration Officer — Controls

Keeping the thesis alive through the integration

Every acquisition is approved on a thesis: a set of beliefs about revenue, cost, capability or market position that justified the price. Integration is where those beliefs meet operating reality, and in banking the meeting is unforgiving. Customer accounts, payment flows, credit files and regulatory reporting cannot stop while systems and teams are combined. The usual failure is a quiet one. The integration plan becomes a list of technical workstreams, the thesis stops being tracked, and a year later nobody can say whether the value arrived.

The Interim Chief Integration Officer holds deal thesis, integration and continuity together, with executive authority to do it. You will set how integration decisions are allocated, including the limits local management keep, and pick the measures by which spending, people and controls are governed through the integration. Which commitments carry forward and which end is your call; you will also stop any proposal passing cost or risk along with no one accountable, and decline investment whose case is silent on adoption, dependencies or the failure scenario. You will approve the integration leadership and how issues reach you, and resolve conflicts with the operating side before money and people are committed. The controls emphasis in the title is deliberate. In any integration the moment of greatest control risk is the handover between old and new, and a strong integration leader protects the controls that work while showing what each exception is costing.

Thesis-tracked milestones, then ownership

The first ninety days should translate the deal thesis into an integration plan whose milestones trace back to it, with continuity risks and control owners agreed for every market. By month nine, integration progress should be reported against the thesis rather than against activity, control gaps should be closing and operations should be running without disruption that customers notice. By month 12, integration controls should have been absorbed into normal operations, and the remaining risks and benefits should sit with operating owners who have accepted them.

An integrator with a cost and platform record

Integration or transformation is what you have led, in organisations with at least $590 million of revenue, 1,000 people and six countries. During a cost transformation you redrew who decided, how work was funded and the rhythm of operating reviews, and your record shows evidence actually moving people, money and management time. The group will weigh your experience of cost transformation, platform pivots and professionalisation: the first because integration synergies are mostly cost, the second because the platform decision is usually the hardest one when two banking operations combine, and the third because integration is often the moment a business grows up. It looks for strategy formation at level 4, with PMO governance, change adoption and value case at level 3. Where facts are missing you say which ones, then decide anyway. A commitment that should end will end without a vote of country leaders, and the whole 12 months are yours to account for.

Meeting those who run what must not stop

The Group Chief Executive Officer is your first meeting, a private conversation over video at the start of week one about the thesis and how you would protect it. Week three is spent with the Board Chair on tracking deal value through an integration. In the fifth week executive leaders from every function, who run the operations that must not stop, meet you in person; the full board follows in the seventh. Our written view of every stage reaches you within two working days.