researchHQ’s Key Takeaways:
- Identity and access management (IAM) is a crucial component of any effective M&A strategy.
- Extensible and centralized IAM allows administrators to manage disparate applications from a single location, ensuring that IAM integration doesn’t slow down the M&A process.
- Modern IAM platforms provide frictionless access across multiple brands, ensuring that customer experience doesn’t suffer during the M&A process.
- Outsourcing IAM to a trusted IAM platform can prove a company’s commitment to data privacy and security, which are increasingly important to potential M&A partners.
For executives, positioning your business for mergers and acquisitions is a bit like searching for a spouse: Ideally, two organizations join together in a binding relationship to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. But just as most first dates don’t lead to marriage, most Merger and Acquisition (M&A) deals fall apart before they ever take place.
Often, due diligence reveals that one company’s internal operations are in disarray, and the dealmakers get cold feet. Even if the deal does go through, research shows that the majority of completed M&As end up coming at a loss to shareholder value.
If you’re looking to put together a successful M&A deal, you need to prove from the outset that you can integrate your operations with a new partner quickly, easily, and securely. That requires putting identity and access management (IAM) at the center of your M&A strategy.
IAM Integration Shouldn’t Slow Down Your M&A
When the ink is dry on your M&A deal, you want to hit the ground running and capitalize on synergies, locate economies of scale, and break into new markets. But part of a merger is the merging of data, allowing you to benefit from each other’s workforces, infrastructure, and market share. If your IAM solutions don’t integrate, you can wind up with duplicate processes, wasted resources, and team members who can’t access the information they need under the new structure.
Trying to handle post-merger integration is a challenge for most in-house developers because coding for identity is a specialized and constantly evolving field. If your IAM solutions aren’t compatible, it can easily take months to integrate applications, and that’s time that internal teams should spend on value creation.
A successful M&A deal has hundreds of moving parts — from consolidating your supply chains to picking out a new logo — and, inevitably, getting both parties in line takes time. But during the onboarding period, employees still need to be able to go ahead with business.
Kurt Borg, senior product owner of Auth0 customer Catena Media, has discussed the challenge of managing multiple teams during acquisitions: “We had a lot of systems that people used to log into with different accounts,” Borg says. “That is a nightmare to maintain and it’s a nightmare for scalability because new people join and need access… And when people leave that is the most delicate thing because you need to make sure that all access is closed. If you don’t have one centralized authentication system, there’s going to be a problem.”
Controlling permissions across multiple systems requires an extensible IAM solution so administrators can manage disparate applications from a single location. Auth0’s platform connects to any application running on any platform or device, with detailed, step-by-step instructions so your developers can integrate across organizations as quickly as possible. That way, legacy applications aren’t holding you back from locating cost synergies and embracing new technologies.
Mergers & Acquisitions Don’t Have to Compromise Customer Experience
Whether your business model is B2B or CIAM, the last thing you want to do is frustrate your customers with M&A disruptions, since every time you lose a customer, your M&A deal loses value. That’s why it’s vital to provide a seamless customer experience during the transition, even while you’re consolidating operations behind the scenes.
A modern IAM platform can enhance customer experience by providing frictionless access across multiple brands. Implementing Single Sign On (SSO) Authentication allows users to log in to one application and then gain access to all of a parent company’s business units without needing to sign in again. Not only does this benefit customer experience, but it’s also the first step in creating a single, unified view of your customer, rather than the same person logging in with multiple sets of credentials. Consolidating customer directories during M&As can take significant time, but with a federated approach to identity, you don’t have to wait to start creating a centralized repository of customer information to act as a single source of truth.
