Acquisitions in the alternative asset space are accelerating. The deal teams are sharper than ever. The technical due diligence is more rigorous. And yet: the first 90 days after close still produce a recurring failure pattern that nobody talks about in the press release.
Two trading systems disagree on a position. Two compliance teams answer the same regulator question differently. The combined entity reports its first month of AUM and the number is wrong.
This is what we've watched happen across every M&A engagement we've run. Here is the playbook to avoid it.
Day 1 to 30 - The Reconciliation Audit
Before you migrate anything, you reconcile what exists.
We start with a single spreadsheet: every data domain, both sides. Trades. Positions. NAV. Investor allocations. Fee accruals. For each row, we record where the source of truth lives in the acquiring entity and where it lives in the acquired one - and whether the two answers agree.
This is rarely interesting on Day 1 and almost always urgent by Day 14. The disagreements compound. Reconciliation tickets pile up. The CFO at the acquiring fund starts asking questions the integration team cannot answer because they have not done this exercise.
Do it first. It is unglamorous and it pays back tenfold.
Day 30 to 60 - Pick Your System of Record
There is exactly one wrong answer here: "we will support both for now."
Pick one. The acquiring fund's stack, in 90% of cases. The other system gets a deprecation date and a migration plan with named owners. People will fight this. Override them. Optionality at this stage is the most expensive thing the combined entity can buy.
Where the acquired fund had genuinely better tooling - they often do, especially in performance reporting or risk - preserve that vendor but migrate the data into the acquiring fund's governance layer. Tool can stay. Source of truth moves.
Day 60 to 90 - The Investor Reporting Truth
The first investor letter sent under the combined brand is the one that gets archived forever. It must be right.
Three weeks before that letter goes out, we run a parallel reporting cycle. We produce the new combined report from the new data layer. We produce the old report from the old systems. We line them up cell by cell. Every variance gets investigated and resolved or explained in the footnotes.
This work is uncomfortable. People resist running anything twice. Run it twice anyway.
Where We Get Pulled In
Funds bring us in for one of three reasons:
1. The deal team did not include data integration in the close-plus-90 budget. This is the most common. The integration plan covered legal, HR, fund admin, prime broker. Data was assumed to "happen organically." It does not happen organically.
2. The acquired fund had a different fund admin. Two admins do not produce the same NAV from the same trades. Closing the gap is a multi-month exercise that has to start before close, not after.
3. The combined entity wants AI on top of unified data. That ambition cannot be built on disagreeing systems. The cleanup has to come first.
The Outcome We Aim For
90 days post-close, the combined entity should produce one daily P&L from one data layer. The investor letter should reconcile to the prime broker. The compliance team should answer regulator questions in one voice.
Anything less and you are paying integration tax on every quarter going forward.