IBS Journal April 2016


The grand merger – ins and outs of a data migration


In June 2013, Swedish headquartered financial services giant Nordea sold off its Polish divisions, Nordea Bank Polska, Finance Polska and Nordea Polska Towarzyst- wo Ubezpieczeniowe for £590 million to the country’s largest bank, PKO Bank Polski. Adam Marciniak, Managing Director for Maintenance and Development of Applica- tions at PKO, talked to IBS Journal about the technological side of the acquisition.


Selection “It all started with a due diligence in the spring of 2013,” says Marciniak. PKO was tasked with understanding the existing IT functionality of Nordea Bank Polska via materials provided by the previous owners. “The task was not easy,” states Marciniak. This was mainly due to the ‘quantity and quality’ of the available materials and ‘a relatively small amount of time allocated to the task’. Crucially, however, the results of the analysis gave PKO a number of insights that shaped subsequent selection decisions.


One of the most important obser-


vations, according to Marciniak, was the discovery that Nordea Bank Polska had systems in place that were completely different (technically and functionally) from those at PKO. The result of this was an agreement between the two parties in the transaction that none of the IT functionality would be included in the deal (with one ex- ception, Econnect for corporate banking). There would be no systems integration, just a migration of data. It was later decided that Nordea processes and products would be implemented in a limited way, mainly for the management of legacy systems. Once the decision had been made


for migration rather than integration, the bank began to work to match the Nordea products and processes to their best rep- resentatives in PKO. Functional gaps were


36 © IBS Intelligence 2016 www.ibsintelligence.com


discovered and removed by performing changes in systems and processes as the analysis continued. The mapping process constituted ‘an essential part of the analysis and defined the further work in the project,’ observes Marciniak. It was a highly intense activity, he adds, involving multiple parties, including the IT teams of both PKO and Nordea. The analysis was concluded over a number of multiple-day workshops. “The key date from an IT perspective was 1st April 2014,” adds Marciniak. This was when the deal had been closed and PKO had obtained the necessary regulatory approvals. Until the legal merger no data was allowed to be transferred due to the two firms being considered by law to be competitors. From that date onwards, says Marciniak, ‘the clock started to tick’ – both parties had agreed an ambitious schedule, aiming for a full operational merger within 12 months. Conversions began in the autumn


of 2013 and continued right up until the operational merger in April. Fourteen in total were made – of which ten were full conversions. The approach ensured that ‘significant defects’ were caught early on the process. The penultimate conversion – the ‘dress rehearsal’ – was conducted on frozen code. In total, the data migration missed


its 12 month target by only 20 days, with each proceeding milestone prior to the


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