What Smart Acquirers Do Before Legal Close

You’ve just announced a merger with another bank. Congratulations!

But the fun is just beginning because now there’s a ton of work to do before legal close, and a bunch more before the system conversation date. Time tends to slip away quickly, so it’s important to get started right away.

At first, there’s usually a big focus on strategy, messaging, and regulatory filings. All important. But if you’re not prioritizing customer-level data access from the bank you’re acquiring, you’re missing a very important lever for making smart decisions both before and after the deal closes.

And when I say data, I’m not talking about a few summary reports or spreadsheets. I’m talking about structured data extracts that help you plan with precision. If you’re serious about hitting the ground running on Day 1, you need the data long before then

Why Early Data Access Changes the Game

Let’s assume that you get the right data extracts soon after the deal is announced. Here are a few of the ways in which you can use them:

Start Plan Product Rationalization Early

Compare pricing, features, and adoption rates across both banks’ offerings.
Identify redundant or underperforming products and start mapping a unified suite that makes sense for your new footprint.
Prep customer migration strategies that minimize disruption.

Spot Overlapping and At-Risk Relationships

See which customers hold accounts at both banks—are they likely to consolidate with you or a competitor?
Identify relationship depth and retention risk across segments—especially for business customers or high-value households.
Pinpoint customers who may be rate-sensitive, digitally disengaged, or tied to branches that may consolidate.

Build Risk and Compliance Reporting That Works on Day 1

Merge and normalize customer risk ratings, BSA/AML data, and CIP/KYC profiles ahead of time.
Test-drive integrated reporting so your compliance team doesn’t spend the first 90 days rebuilding dashboards from scratch.

Map GL Accounts and Prep for Financial Reporting

Align account structures so you’re ready for consolidated financials from Day 1.
Avoid last-minute scrambles to reconcile general ledgers when core systems converge.

Estimate Fair Value Adjustments and Intangible Assets

Use customer-level data to preliminarily assess loan marks, core deposit intangibles (CDIs), and goodwill.
The more historical and behavioral data you have, the more accurate your valuation models will be—and the less painful your post-close accounting process becomes.

What to Ask For

Before conversion, push hard for a full suite of data extracts—ideally more than once so you can build a before-and-after picture. Every core system has some form of report writer that can extract data and save it to formatted files. Start with that, and accept no excuses.

At a minimum, ask for:

Customer master files with demographics, relationship start dates, and risk codes
Account histories for all products—balances, rates, activity over time
Loan performance data, including delinquencies, payments, and charge-offs
Deposit transaction histories—not just balances, but movement and behavior
Product-level data, including pricing, features, and terms
CRM or sales data if available, such as touchpoints, cross-sell activity, etc.
Detailed financial statements to support GL account mapping.

Yes, You Can Share Data Pre-Close—Here’s How to Do It Right

Understandably, some banks are hesitant to hand over detailed customer data before legal close. But if both parties are serious about a smooth transition, it’s not just doable—it’s smart.

Here are three ways to handle it responsibly:

1. Tighten Up Your NDAs or Draft a Standalone Data Sharing Agreement
  - Spell out what’s being shared, who can access it, how it’s stored, and how long it’s retained.
  - Limit access to essential personnel or secure third-party advisors.
2. Use a Neutral Data Partner
  - A trusted third party (yes, even a consultant who understands both banking and data infrastructure) can receive, clean, and prepare the data for integration planning—without exposing sensitive customer info.
3. Start With Anonymized or Non-PII Data
  - If needed, begin with masked extracts that still allow for segmentation, profitability analysis, and product mapping.
4. Use the Integration Team as the Firewall
  - Keep the data-sharing team separate from frontline sales or credit staff. This limits any perceptions that the data are being used competitively pre-close.

Bottom line: there’s a responsible way to do this, and it beats scrambling after legal close when systems start going dark and institutional memory starts walking out the door.

Don’t Forget the History!

Once the system conversion is underway, it gets much harder to retrieve historical data—especially transaction histories, rate tables, product lineage, and channel usage. That data is gold for:

Future customer segmentation
Marketing attribution
Profitability analysis
CDI and goodwill impairment reviews down the road

So make sure you’re requesting multi-year extracts before anything is decommissioned. And capture metadata (field definitions, business logic, code tables) while the people who understand it are still around.

One Caveat . . .

All of the above presumes that you have an existing data warehouse containing detailed customer/account/transaction information which you can pull the target bank information into.

If you don’t . . . well, that’s a problem of a different magnitude. One which you’ll have to scramble to address.

Closing Thought

Every merger announcement triggers a frenzy of meetings and timelines—but getting the right data, early, is what turns big goals into executable plans. If you wait until legal close to dig into the numbers, you’re already behind.

If your bank is navigating a merger and you’re not sure what to ask for—or how to make sense of the data once you get it—I’m here to help.

Let’s make the numbers work for you.