“Early on in the merger, I tried to use Excel,” recalls Chris Dichiara. “But piecing together hundreds of Excel files, figuring out what was happening in each of the hundreds of initiatives, getting visibility over the process — workstreams, financial data, roadmaps, milestones — it didn’t work out so well.”
The EY team who led the post-merger integration recommended their end-to-end digital platform, EY Capital Edge, to bring all this complexity into a streamlined solution. Fiserv was able to fully tailor the EY Capital Edge tool to best meet their needs. The tool provided a monthly package which provided all the reporting and insights necessary to keep the new organization on track to meet their synergy targets and execute upon the overall M&A strategy. The platform kept everyone — from the individual initiative owners to the Fiserv executive leadership team — aligned, provided instant visibility across the whole process, and ensured everyone was talking from the same numbers: it brought efficiency to chaos.
“EY Capital Edge was fluid, flexible, cloud-based and easy-to-access,” says Dichiara. “Bringing in EY and EY Capital Edge to help organize the process really accelerated the deal. We’ve got over 100 people on the platform today: all our teams use it. I see the same data being used in one of our business units as in Corporate where I sit.”
A merger of this size encompassing hundreds of solutions, millions of clients and billions of data points, requires “an entire organizational effort,” says Dichiara. The EY team were “there the next week,” putting together the process, instituting controls, and “being innovative in the way they were thinking,” he says. “They built connections internally with us and were extremely flexible…helping us take the Capital Edge tool and really integrate it into our existing financial planning and budgeting processes.” The EY organization did more than provide a flexible digital solution: they got under the skin of the company, bringing a broad range of experience in where it was needed, helping deliver on the strategy.
Critical to Dichiara personally was having absolute confidence in the financials. “We had no room for error,” he says, “and using EY Capital Edge… gave me 100% comfort in signing off on the numbers.”
The newly combined company, now called Fiserv, is already outperforming its initial targets. Within 8 months following deal close, the US$900 million cost synergy target was increased to US$1.2 billion and on the revenue side, “we’ve already upped that target to US$600 million,” says Dichiara. With the help of EY Capital Edge, Fiserv is well on its way to achieving all its external commitments and most importantly, as Dichiara reflects, “the integration has come together in a way that we're that we're winning in [our] clients’ offices.”
The merged Fiserv is efficiently cross-selling capabilities to its clients, providing a seamless, globally-integrated payment solution that is delivering additional value to its customers.