Mergers and acquisitions offer a powerful way to accelerate growth, expand into new markets, and drive strategic transformation. But for treasury teams, they also introduce one thing in abundance: complexity.
Suddenly, you’re dealing with fragmented banking relationships, legacy systems that don’t talk to each other, and a web of disjointed processes, all while senior leadership is looking for fast insights and tighter control.
For treasury professionals, M&A isn’t just a corporate event. It’s a stress test.
If you’re relying on spreadsheets or siloed systems, your visibility and control can disappear overnight. But with the right infrastructure in place, treasury can become a stabilizing force, delivering clarity, consistency, and insight during a high-pressure period of change.
Here, we’ll take a look at the core treasury challenges that come with M&A, and share a practical playbook filled with real treasurers’ advice for managing operations through integration and beyond.
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Top M&A Challenges for Treasury
So, what does that stress test look like? While every M&A transaction will bring its own set of unique risks and challenges, there are some common themes that arise from a wide range of M&A activity.
Fragmented Bank Accounts and Relationships
Acquiring or merging with another business often means inheriting dozens of new bank accounts across different providers, formats, and platforms. Without central visibility, it’s easy to lose track of available liquidity, especially when legacy teams still rely on their own systems.
Treasurers must quickly consolidate this patchwork of accounts under a single view, so that data is accessible, accurate, and updated in real-time.
Inconsistent Processes Across Entities
Each company has its own treasury routines, such as payment schedules, reconciliation cadences, forecasting methods, and approval flows. Post-acquisition, the challenge is to understand those differences and begin the process of aligning teams to a shared standard, without disrupting day-to-day cash operations.
Treasury must balance short-term continuity with longer-term standardization, which is a must if the promised efficiencies of a merger or acquisition are to be realized.
Recommended: What CFOs Need to Know About the New FTC Merger Rules
Limited Visibility Into Legacy Systems
ERP and TMS platforms rarely integrate seamlessly during a merger. Meanwhile, each system might hold critical pieces of the cash puzzle, from open invoices and upcoming payables to intercompany loans.
Treasury needs tools that can bridge systems quickly, delivering real-time cash data and insights before formal integration work is complete.
Increased Risk Exposure and Audit Demands
Acquisitions often come with regulatory oversight, investor scrutiny, and elevated audit pressure. Treasury must ensure every transaction is traceable, every balance verifiable, and every report audit-ready, across both legacy and acquiring organizations.
Trying to stitch this together manually under time pressure is a recipe for risk that needs to be carefully managed.
Why Treasury Infrastructure Matters Before Integration Is Finished
M&A deals can move fast. Legal closes sometimes happen in weeks. But treasury integration can take months, or even years. In the meantime, the business still needs clear answers on liquidity, capital deployment, and cash availability.
Without scalable systems, treasury can’t deliver the insight or control the business expects. And once bad data or poor processes take hold, they’re hard to unwind.
To avoid this, treasury needs to be one step ahead. The challenges outlined above need to be dealt with immediately, even if full business integration is still months or years away. That means building a structure that can flex to accommodate new accounts, new entities, and new reporting needs instantly, not six months down the line.
“When you’re not looped in until the end, you end up reacting instead of planning. Treasury needs a seat at the table before the business makes moves—otherwise you’re just cleaning up the mess.” — Laura Loeffler, Treasury Manager, Real Chemistry
A Playbook for Treasury Integration During M&A
We’ve looked at the problems, so now let’s consider the solutions. If you’re facing or planning for an acquisition or merger, here’s how to stay in control:
Centralize Banking Data Across Legacy Accounts
The obvious first place to start is to integrate banking data from both the existing and new accounts into a single source of truth. What’s less obvious is how to practically implement it. Legacy connection methods, which utilize individual or batched data file transfers, can take months to set up and have a range of shortcomings for delivering real-time, accurate data.
However, API-based bank aggregation can bring all pre and post-merger accounts into a single platform. Whether they’re domestic or international, legacy or new, all cash should be visible in real time, without logging into dozens of portals.
More importantly, connections can be set up in days (or even hours). This is the foundation of post-deal control, enabled through the use of API-first treasury management platforms.
Standardize Tagging Across Each Organization
With the foundation of banking visibility in place, the next step is to ensure that this data is usable. Tagging is a simple, powerful way to enable this. With a modern platform like Trovata, treasury can create shared tagging rules to categorize transactions by entity, business unit, or cash flow type. Tags give treasury a single taxonomy for analysis, even before systems are fully integrated.
“Transaction tagging isn’t just a best practice—it’s a strategic necessity. The more complex your treasury operation, the more essential a strong tagging structure becomes.” Christina Jewel, Treasury Manager, Gibson
It’s the fastest way to create consistency and enable insight.
Build Entity-Level Forecasts and Roll Them Up
As Kimber Davis, Senior Treasury Manager at Speedcast, explained, don’t wait for full integration before you forecast. Instead, create modular forecasts for each legacy organization or business unit. Then roll them up into a combined group-level view that leadership can rely on for planning and capital allocation.
“We built a modular forecasting model because full integration takes time, and execs don’t want to wait six months to know where their cash is.”— Kimber Davis, Senior Treasury Manager at Speedcast
This modular approach ensures accuracy without sacrificing oversight. It also positions treasury as a key driver for value extraction from the entire M&A process. You are in the box seat to identify opportunities for efficiency gains, analyze profitability across product lines and business units, and assess and review costs.
Learn more about how Kimber helped Speedcast upgrade and transform its treasury processes and technology to handle rapid growth through M&A, helping her get promoted five—yes—five times!:
Enable Real-Time Variance Analysis
As you well know, forecasting is never a one-time thing, especially with all the unknowns that come with a merger or acquisition. In short, as you begin forecasting across the new combined organization, expect volatility. Use tools that make it easy to compare forecast vs. actuals and drill down into variances by entity, region, or cash flow.
“You can’t forecast on lagging data. You just can’t. When you’re in an environment that’s changing daily, you need tools that give you a live look at where you stand—not where you stood two weeks ago.”— Laura Loeffler, Treasury Manager, Real Chemistry
Quick adjustments based on data will keep your treasury team agile during integration.
Make Treasury a Cross-Functional Partner
Each of these steps enable treasury to become an integral part of the M&A transition. Treasury must collaborate with FP&A, legal, accounting, and IT to align assumptions, consolidate reporting, and surface risks early. Using shared data and centralized platforms builds trust and drives alignment across functions.
The more visible and integrated treasury is, the more value it adds during change.
Own the Integration Moment
M&A doesn’t just change the day to day operations of a business, it redefines what’s expected from treasury. With the right tools, processes, and mindset, you can deliver clarity in the chaos, strengthen your role as a strategic partner, and help the business realize the full value of the deal.
Trovata gives treasurers the platform to scale seamlessly through M&A, enabling instant visibility, powerful forecasting, and scalable reporting without adding headcount or waiting for lengthy IT implementations.
Want to see how Trovata can help you stay calm and in control through M&A chaos? Book a demo today.
