Post-acquisition cash visibility gaps leave group liquidity highly vulnerable to escalating cyber threats and internal oversight failures. Karen Fagan, Head of Treasury Consultancy Service at AccessPay, breaks down why modular bank connectivity must move from a secondary operational chore to a Day-Zero priority for modern CFOs.
It’s 9 am on a Monday. You’re the CFO of a medium to large-sized group, and the deal to acquire a multi-million-pound business has closed. What do you do next? For many CFOs, understanding the new entity’s cash position and establishing payment controls are key priorities. However, it’s not always that straightforward; meanwhile, the post-acquisition period is fraught with heightened risk.
The first challenge is getting an up-to-date view of the incoming company’s cash position. This is a critical piece of information used to assess that the acquired company’s financial situation is ‘as expected’, and the board will expect an update as soon as possible.
Yet without the appropriate technology and systems access in place, the CFO’s visibility is limited to a daily phone call to the incoming finance team asking for the necessary information. And if the acquired business spans multiple counties, that daily call becomes multiple calls, with multiple finance teams.
Additionally, those teams will not necessarily have an up-to-date, consolidated view of cash. Multinational businesses typically have hundreds of bank accounts, but often rely on manual processes to collate bank statement information and determine the latest cash position. As a result, there is an inherent time lag in cash positioning figures.
Beyond the immediate cash-visibility challenges, CFOs need to establish control processes with the incoming teams and navigate the tricky interim period between the old way of doing things and the new. Often, those early days post-acquisition see finance departments rely on trust and temporary fixes, for instance, requesting a list of outgoing payments for approval and directing finance teams to seek approval for any additional transactions via email.
This approach, however, puts companies in a precarious position. The period between the close of the deal and its announcement, plus the initial weeks after it becomes public, is ripe for fraud and malfeasance. Disruption to the status quo and the introduction of new people and processes make it an ideal time for fraudsters to try their luck.
Internally, insider fraud is an ever-present risk, as well-publicised cases demonstrate. Weak, temporary controls only make it easier for disgruntled finance employees to transfer funds from company accounts to their own accounts.
Externally, fraudsters will identify acquired firms as prime targets for phishing and business email compromise, for instance, by sending spoofed emails from the new group CFO requesting an urgent wire transfer for group cash management purposes.
The Department for Science Innovation & Technology’s (DSIT) cyber security breaches survey for 2025-26 corroborates this threat. It found that 63% of large businesses reported being subject to phishing attacks, and 47% stated that people had impersonated their organisation or staff online or via email during the last 12 months. Meanwhile, UK Finance’s Annual Fraud Report revealed that a record £84.9m was lost to non-personal authorised push payment (APP) fraud in 2024.
Acquisitive companies, such as private equity firms, are familiar with this pattern of heightened risk post-deal. To combat this, they issue guidance to staff on both sides of the transaction to be aware of the increased likelihood of cyberattacks and to establish interim financial controls during the transition.
These include the verbal (not email) verification of outgoing payments with group treasury; a basic step, but one that is costly to skip. Dual authorisation of electronic payments at certain thresholds is also advised, as is having dual bank administrators, so that any changes to the banking set-up, such as adding new beneficiaries or changing limits, are signed by two people. Changes should also ideally trigger alerts to the management team.
These measures will help mitigate risks in the short term, but ultimately, the best protection comes from integrating treasury systems sooner rather than later. The faster that treasury infrastructure is integrated, the faster that consistent, robust group procedures can be established.
Often, CFOs assume they need to wait until the deal closes before starting this process, but normally, the company integration timeline is known weeks in advance of the deal closing, so it is best to start discussing treasury integration as a priority then.
The next stumbling block is that integrating treasury infrastructures is complex, due to the multiple back-end systems, payment rails and banking relationships involved. And that’s before the technical integration, testing and security considerations come into play. So, the default position is to assume there needs to be an all-or-nothing approach, which can see treasury integrations pushed down the line. However, there is another option: introducing bank connectivity.
Bank connectivity is an agnostic layer that sits between back-office systems and banks, using host-to-host connections to facilitate the flow of data between systems and banking partners. It enables companies to automate payment workflows, provides an aggregated overview of the organisation’s entire finance and treasury estate and gives CFOs an up-to-date view of the cash position. Additionally, new back-office systems and banks can be easily added at any time, providing CFOs with greater flexibility in their infrastructure.
Crucially, a specialist bank connectivity solution can be implemented more quickly than a full-scale treasury integration. Time to go live is typically under four weeks, enabling companies to establish group-wide finance controls rapidly.
Where acquiring companies already have bank connectivity in place, the integration process can be accelerated, with groundwork undertaken to determine which systems and banks need to be connected before the deal closes, or even seeking permission to start establishing connections. Either way, CFOs will be in a much better position from the outset than if they start from zero. Even then, acquisitive companies can take a phased approach to integration and avoid the all-or-nothing trap; after all, 80% of payment flows on automated controls is 80% more secure than relying on manual controls.
Finally, there are also long-term benefits. When enterprise resource planning (ERP) or treasury management system (TMS) consolidation occurs, and banking relationships are rationalised, bank connectivity means that all relevant payment and cash data already sits in one place, so migrations become operational tasks rather than months- or years-long projects.
Treasury and banking infrastructure often sit near the bottom of most M&A integration checklists, typically considered too complex to handle until the deal closes. Yet this means that CFOs have limited cash visibility, rely on manual controls, and finance teams have to weather an extended period of heightened risk. Bank connectivity offers an alternative, enabling CFOs to lay the foundations for treasury integration before the deal closes and putting them in a much better position from day one.
