Mergers and acquisitions ; Organisational change ; Project and programme management

It was July 2003. Dr Izak Botha, head of the merger and integration committee of banking group, Nedcor (Nedcor M&R), finished reading the report that the treasury integration steering committee had produced on the integration of the group's treasury operations. In July the previous year Nedcor had purchased BOE, the sixth largest bank in South Africa, and Nedcor had decided to use this purchase as an opportunity, not only to integrate BOE into Nedcor, but also two other banks that had operated within the group, Nedbank Investment Bank (NIB) and Cape of Good Hope Bank (CoGH). The treasury integration had been a very risky operation. If it had failed, it could have brought down the bank or had widespread ramifications for the treasury market as a whole. The treasury appeared to have achieved the impossible: a complex integration in record time, with no fall-out for the bank. At times over the past few months, Botha and the board of Nedcor had felt that, in typical fashion, the treasury was trying to do its own thing and was placing the bank at tremendous risk as a result. Nedcor M&R had had to restrain the treasury integration team on a couple of occasions, but they had done it. The treasury was the first division in the bank to have completed its integration - save for some minor archiving of information that was still outstanding. The rest of the group's integration process was still under way and would probably only be finished at the end of 2004. Was there anything that the other divisions in the bank could learn from the integration experience at the treasury? How much of what the division had achieved had been good judgment and how much had simply been good luck?