Post-acquisition integration of two lenders

Two mid-market lenders — one acquired, one acquiring, similar in size and different in almost everything else — closed with a synergy case built in diligence and a hundred-day plan built from convention: brand first, systems early, synergies everywhere. The acquired lender’s book was concentrated: twenty broker relationships originated 60% of its volume, and three credit officers held most of what the book knew about itself.

The integration risk was not in the cost lines. It was in those twenty relationships and three people.

The pre-close review re-ordered the plan around where value could actually be destroyed. The conventional sequence would have spent the first hundred days on branding and core-banking migration while the brokers took calls from competitors. The First 100 Days Ledger inverted it: every broker and every named key person became a day-1–30 workstream with an owner; systems migration was scoped and deliberately deferred to month 8.

Protection ran first and personally: the twenty brokers were visited inside thirty days with pricing and service commitments in writing; the three credit officers were retained by name before any structure was announced. A combined decision-rights ledger for the seam published on day one — credit decisions kept dual sign-off for ninety days, then unified under the merged credit policy.

The operating model merged in month 2–8: one credit policy, one origination process, one management cadence — each a drawn commitment with a frozen baseline. Cost synergies were released only when the protection metrics held, which they did: 1.9% revenue attrition against the 9.1% the data says convention delivers.

Synergies verified line by line against the deal model — one attribution line per benefit, no double counting.