The Situation
In March 2019, a global IT services firm acquired a Dublin-founded, London-based fintech whose platform automated post-trade processing for taxes, fees, commissions, and cash flows across global financial institutions, including regulatory work such as CSDR. At acquisition the software was trusted by five of the world's eight largest investment banks. As transaction context, the prior PE investors exited at a 4.0x return and a 47% IRR, with an implied transaction value in the £80 to 100M+ range and a €16.2M FY2018 accumulated profit base.
Ninety days post-close the team had no acquirer credentials, no standard tooling, no delivery cadence, and no communication from leadership about what integration would look like. The co-founder was the sole keeper of the legacy codebase. I was brought in by the acquirer's accelerator group as integration lead to build the governance and delivery systems and integrate the organization into Cognizant.
Challenge
Single Point of Failure
The co-founding CTO was the sole keeper of the legacy codebase. All production triage ran through one person at a platform embedded in globally systemic banks.
No Product Ownership
Work was driven entirely by client contracts, moving from SOW to technical task with no prioritization in between and no product owner in place.
Delivery Cadence in Name Only
The team understood the principles but ran no ceremonies. No cadence, no grooming, no retrospectives. Whoever was loudest got prioritized.
Five Siloed Product Lines
Sales, BA, engineering, and implementation operated without a shared communication pattern across five distinct product lines. Decisions did not travel.
No Standard Tooling
The team ran on a proprietary task system. The acquirer's standard stack of Jira, GitHub, Slack, and Confluence had not been provisioned by day 90.
Integration Vacuum
Leadership was silent. A 30+ person team was running anxious and disengaged, with no credentials, no onboarding, and no visibility into life inside the parent company.
Actions
Delivery Standards Rollout
Cadence, ceremonies, story standards, backlog management, and definition of done delivered to the whole organization across Dublin and London.
Jira from Scratch
Jira configured for five product lines with the proprietary task system mapped and migrated in parallel. No work lost in the transition.
Backlog Consolidation
Client enhancement work reprioritized against strategic goals for the first time, and fragmented reactive backlogs structured into one repeatable model.
Delivery Lifecycle
An end-to-end lifecycle designed and implemented, replacing ad hoc contract-driven development with a repeatable, enterprise-compatible system.
Tooling Provisioned
A full roster of 30+ employees built and maintained, with parent-company credentials provisioned to close the day-90 tooling gap.
Integration Liaison
Served as the bridge across the acquired company, the acquirer's accelerator group, and the Banking and Financial Services business unit throughout integration.
Results
30+ person organization integrated
Realized resultEvery employee across engineering, BA, product, implementation, and sales in Dublin and London trained on the delivery model and provisioned with parent-company tooling, from zero.
Five backlogs structured into one model
Realized resultFragmented, client-reactive backlogs across five product lines structured against strategic priority and migrated into Jira from a proprietary system.
Delivery lifecycle stood up from zero
Realized resultAn end-to-end lifecycle designed and implemented, replacing ad hoc development with a repeatable, enterprise-compatible delivery system.
Key-person risk addressed
Realized resultTechnical documentation and knowledge dissemination started against a single-person dependency that was a material continuity risk for a platform supporting systemic financial infrastructure.
£80 to 100M+ implied transaction value
Contextual transaction valueThe implied value of the asset at exit, based on the sourced valuation analysis. Included as the scale of the environment the integration ran inside.
€16.2M historical profit base at stake
Contextual company scaleThe accumulated profit base of the acquired business at the time of the transaction. Company context, not value I created or defended.
Her contributions to coaching and training the teams left a lasting impact, resulting in the formation of a dedicated agile function within the business.