Merging an acquired IFA back-book in six weeks
A consolidator completes on a £900m-AUA advice firm. The acquired book runs on CURO; the group runs Intelliflo. The integration clock is ticking.
The situation
A private-equity-backed wealth consolidator completes its fourth acquisition: a regional advice firm, roughly 6,200 client groups and £900m AUA, running its back office on CURO. The group standard is Intelliflo. Until the book moves, the group is paying two licence stacks, running two operations processes, and reporting to its board with a spreadsheet bridge.
Week 0–2: Migration Readiness Assessment (£12k fixed)
We profile the CURO estate: every table, every field, distributions, null rates, duplicate clients, orphaned plans, referential breaks. Typical findings at this stage — and the reason we assess before quoting: ~3% duplicate client records from a previous partial dedupe, adviser codes that stopped meaning anything in 2019, and 14 years of fee history in three inconsistent formats.
Out: a data quality findings report with each issue priced (remediate, transform around, or accept), a field-level source-to-target gap analysis, a cutover plan, and a fixed delivery quote.
Week 3–8: Migration Delivery (£45–60k band, fixed)
Mapping specification drafted by the engine, reviewed and signed by an engineer, versioned. Transforms and their tests generated from the signed spec. Two full dry runs against production-scale extracts, each ending in complete reconciliation — the second proves the fixes from the first. Cutover on a weekend: source freeze Friday, load and reconcile Saturday, go/no-go Sunday against criteria agreed in week 4, users on Intelliflo Monday.
The evidence pack
Row-level reconciliation of every record, financial totals agreed, every exception listed with its disposition, compiled and signed. The group's compliance function files it; the next acquisition's diligence cites it.
What could go wrong — and how it's handled
The classic failure is discovering mid-flight that the acquired firm's fee data can't support the group's charging disclosures. That's why fee history is profiled in week one, priced as a finding, and decided by the client with numbers on the table — not discovered by operations in month three.
Recognise your situation? Tell us the source system, the target, and the deadline — we'll tell you within 48 hours whether we can hit it and what the Assessment will cost.
freddie@godwit.uk