Issues

The small but well-regarded Frankfurt based investment bank Drueker & Co., intended to merge with the Milano based Gruppo Banca Leonardo to form the European Investment bank, Leonardo & Co. As the massive and innovative use of IT was one of the sources of success in the past, Drueker & Co. intended to prepare itself for the IT integration discussions up-front. They hence asked for an expertise to define their necessary IT requirements within a merged organisation.

Objectives

The advisors role was to analyse the nature of Drueker & Co.’s current operational model, derive the requirements to the supporting IT, match them with the installed IT to finally come up with a recommendation of what level of support needed to be regarded as indisputable during negotiations.

Deliverables

As a result we found, that the IT support for the organisational model of an advanced advisory firm like Drueker & Co. distinctively differs from that one of conventional bank where IT is dominated by the operational needs of retail business and the strict regulatory rules of the supervising bodies. With these arguments at hand we succeeded to convince both parties that in order to maintain the value of the Frankfurt operations and derive synergies form the merger it was essential to keep substantial parts of IT support in a separate organisation.