Buenos Aires, Argentina
Acquisitions are decided on a model and survive or fail on execution.
Around thirty targets assessed before signing, and five integrations or separations delivered afterwards.
The problem
Acquisitions are decided on a model and survive or fail on execution. The diligence tells you what a company has; it rarely tells you whether the team you are inheriting can deliver the plan that justified the price, or what it will actually cost to make two organisations into one.
I have worked both halves — the assessment before signing, and the integration afterwards, where platform decisions, cost structure and probable scenarios are owned in front of the board.
Before the deal
As CTO of a multifamily office acquiring fintech companies, I assessed roughly thirty targets across consumer lending, capital-markets technology and fintech infrastructure: architecture, technical debt, true cost of ownership, vendor lock-in, key-person concentration and regulatory exposure. My job was to translate what we found into price, structure, or the decision not to proceed — and to present a reasoned position to the investment committee rather than a systems inventory.
Several of those assessments ended in a recommendation not to proceed. That is not a failed diligence. It is the cheapest outcome available when the technology cannot carry the thesis.
After the deal
Integration is where the synergy case meets a core nobody wants to touch. The questions are concrete and they are all expensive: what gets unified and what is left running, on what timeline shared systems can be pulled apart, what the promised savings actually cost to deliver, and which scenario you fall back to when the first one proves impossible.
Selected work
Three-country insurance merger
Technology workstream on the merger of two general insurers across three regulatory jurisdictions simultaneously, covering integration strategy and technology backbones. The wider transaction, publicly valued at close to USD 1.6 billion, made the acquirer the second-largest P&C insurer in Latin America and the market leader in general insurance in Chile.
Carve-out assessment for a global private equity fund
Evaluated carve-out scenarios for a business unit inside the largest payments company in the country — a business publicly valued at around USD 1.4 billion at the time of the fund's entry, processing billions of transactions a year. The separation scenario we assessed was substantially the one the market executed years later.
Post-M&A integration at a listed bank
Assessed post-acquisition integrations for a listed banking group, covering the core platform upgrade, middleware strategy, Banking-as-a-Service and the prioritisation of the resulting initiative portfolio.
Cross-border merger in automotive distribution
Technology strategy and backbone integration for the acquisition of a local operation by a global distributor.
Contact
If you are building, rebuilding or rescuing a technology organisation, write to me at hernan@hernancurras.com. A first conversation costs nothing and usually takes thirty minutes.
Also on LinkedIn.