The firm operates in a highly competitive sector where global players vie for an increased share of the world’s market for reinsurance, health, retirement, and risk management services. As a $12B engine of growth, the firm has become one of the world’s top players in a market increasingly defined by disruptive innovation.
The firm has grown through hundreds of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures for over 40 years. In the 21st century, the firm seeks accelerated growth through the adoption of a standard operating model as well as M&A.
All M&A have integration decisions and efficiency assumptions built in during due diligence. The work of cross-functional M&A teams is to convert the due diligence done by a few people into a large operational rollout that successfully combines the entities. To accomplish this, enterprise workflows involve many players throughout both organisations -- however, M&A has very strict confidentiality requirements.
How does an organisation like the firm operationalise the process of M&A to be agile, secure, and compliant? Simple – they leverage the power of a platform and the skills of a proven partner like INRY.
The Approach
As part of a potential large-scale acquisition envisioned for 2021, the firm realized that current systems and processes were not suited to future needs. The firm considered other options, but other low-code tools were less embedded in the firm environment than the leading platform recommended by INRY and its wide-ranging capabilities.
Next, the firm also evaluated several high-maturity portfolio management tools. Some of these tools could provide a standard data model but were comparatively difficult to roll out – creating users across multiple organizations was complex, and the system could not handle external users. Additionally, INRY provided configuration capabilities that matched or exceeded other tools. Merger and acquisition activities require fast changes as business decisions are continuously evolving.
INRY built the pre-eminent system of nimble interaction for high-impact requests, including employee, technology, and customer experiences. Built from the ground up with security and process traceability in mind, the solution provided the firm with an ideal foundation to build an M&A Portal capability to make the process consistent, scalable, and nimble.
Working side-by-side with INRY, the firm team incrementally implemented a robust M&A Portal that included critical features like:
As the firm looked to fulfil these and other critical technology and functional requirements, the platform recommended by INRY proved to be an ideal choice thanks to built-in security, process traceability, accessibility, and ergonomics. Likewise, INRY surfaced as an ideal partner for this engagement thanks to its deep knowledge of the INRY platform and the firm’s business. The firm and INRY worked to deploy the first iterations of the M&A Portal in a matter of weeks, then refined it incrementally afterwards to support more complex functional and technical requirements.
Unfortunately, the proposed merger between the firm and one of its industry peers that drove the development of the M&A Portal didn’t materialise. While the transaction wasn’t meant to be, the investments to facilitate it remains ready to bolster the firm’s M&A capabilities.
By investing in an INRY application that helps to apply greater levels of consistency, security, and agility to their M&A process, the firm has realized benefits that include:
As we’ve seen, an effective merger and acquisition engine comes from many things – including finance, legal, and operational excellence. By allowing these teams to focus on the fundamentals of the deal rather than the mechanics of information exchange, the M&A Portal built atop the INRY platform allows the firm to fully explore the possibilities of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures as a means of market-leading growth.