All bank merger transactions require intensive analysis and risk assessment before migrating acquired product sets into an acquirer’s existing product portfolio. Properly executed product mapping offers more than a comparable product evaluation. It’s a one-time opportunity to analyze the financial institution’s portfolio profit scenarios resulting from mapping decisions.
Leveraging strategic product mapping processes yields significant insights and better alignment with customer needs.
Set financial and customer experience strategies to guide the merger mapping process
Dive into pricing impacts at a relationship level rather than just at the product category level
Assess pricing risks and develop a plan prior to closing to address those risks before they become a long list of exceptions
Develop a long-term plan to fit the migrated products into the broader portfolio rather than developing workarounds that simply delay solving issues you will face in the future
Map acquired products to inform customer impacts, portfolio pricing challenges and revenue forecasting projections.
Enable buyer engagement throughout the customer conversion journey through a deep analysis of product mapping strategies. In many cases, acquiring banks choose to make wholesale mapping decisions to assign the cohort of new banking products to existing acquired products. In some instances, the concept of mirror or grandfathered products become necessary for post-merger customer retention.
Effective M&A product mapping is really customer mapping.
A more concentrated look at account level mapping can reveal significant “a-ha” moments that impact the strategic decision making of an acquirer. Whether these are balance considerations to bifurcate mapping decisions between new products or the creation of defined fee-waiver periods of time to allow customers to move to other products without penalty, an effective and well thought out merger mapping initiative can provide significant differentiation leading to greater customer retention following the acquisition.
For many financial institutions, this is the only time they will be able to look at these customers at a segment level with this much detail. By engaging in a M&A customer mapping initiative, financial institutions can better meet new customer needs, realize pricing strategy strengths and challenges and build a platform for growth to exceed the merger transactions’ profitability.
