Traditional due diligence relies on target bank documentation and IT interviews. The problem: documentation is outdated, incomplete, or wrong. IT teams don't know their complete landscape. Critical dependencies hide in tribal knowledge.

Organizations often discover during integration that their processes touch far more systems than documentation shows, including critical fraud detection, regulatory reporting, and customer notification capabilities. Integration planning based on incomplete discovery fails catastrophically.

Many M&A integrations attempt wholesale system consolidation—shut down target systems and migrate everything to acquirer platforms. This approach promises rapid synergy realization but delivers disaster.

The mathematics are unforgiving: migrating decades of business logic, customer data, and operational processes without complete understanding creates cascading failures. Big-bang core consolidation attempts can suffer extended periods of customer service failures, regulatory violations, and revenue loss that exceeds the entire acquisition cost.

Conservative approaches run both systems in parallel until confident in migration. This reduces risk but doubles costs and extends timelines indefinitely. Organizations maintain duplicate infrastructure, reconcile differences manually, and struggle to declare victory. Parallel systems can run for years, with substantial annual spending on redundant infrastructure while never achieving confidence to complete migration. The "safe" approach becomes a permanent cost burden.

The Systems Context Comprehension wizard analyzes target bank systems comprehensively in 2-3 weeks through automated examination of all available artifacts. Discover every system, map every dependency, identify every customization—all before the deal closes. This comprehensive discovery can reveal significantly more systems than documented, including critical regulatory reporting capabilities, enabling accurate integration cost estimation.

The Architecture Module's System Change Simulations enable testing integration strategies in safe environments before touching production. Model different consolidation approaches, validate migration assumptions, and prove integration plans work before committing resources.

Create complete As-Is documentation of target systems automatically. Design To-Be architecture with full dependency understanding. Simulate the migration path, identifying every issue before it impacts customers. Organizations can test multiple consolidation strategies, discovering optimal approaches that save substantial time and costs compared to initial plans.

The System Sunset capability analyzes whether existing systems can absorb retiring systems' capabilities without losing business functionality. Map every service, data element, and process from target systems to determine what can be retired, what must be preserved, and what requires new capabilities. Organizations can safely decommission significant portions of acquired systems by redistributing capabilities to existing infrastructure, eliminating substantial annual maintenance costs while ensuring no business capabilities are lost.

M&A often involves complex partner ecosystems—fintech relationships, payment processors, data providers. The Partner Integration Simulation capability tests how acquired partner relationships integrate with existing ecosystems before making commitments.

Simulate partner integrations in staging environments, identify compatibility issues, and design optimal integration approaches. Organizations can discover compatibility issues with payment processors or other critical partners, enabling renegotiation before deals close.