M&A technology execution.Operational certainty for buy-side, sell-side and private equity sponsors.
A deal is won on strategy and price. It is realised or lost, in the technology.
Book a A 15-minute confidential call with a senior practitioner, not a salesperson. Under NDA where needed.
Who owns the technology workstream?
That choice decides if the deal model survives contact with the estate. It is the decision this page is written for.
SCC runs the workstream end to end; technical diligence, Day 1 readiness, separation or integration and the TSA exit. We do not provide general strategy. We provide the execution required to validate the valuation, hold Day 1 and exit the TSA without disrupting business continuity. Senior practitioners stay with the engagement from the first diligence conversation to exit day. The same people throughout.
The capability gap
Traditional advisory models split the transaction into two camps, and both leave a gap. A strategy firm produces a plan shaped around Day 1 and moves on; that is typically the moment the plan first meets the real world and begins to bend.
In large delivery organisations, the people who understand the commercial context of the deal are rarely the people making day-to-day decisions six months later. Teams change, priorities shift and the deal logic gets diluted on its way down. Nobody is acting in bad faith. It is the structure of how the work is usually bought.
It’s running is not the same as it’s working. We hold the workstream to the business case. Cost takeouts landed and the TSA closed on the date the model assumed.
Most of the value does not leak in the deal. It leaks in the delivery, in the space between a plan that reads well and an outcome nobody owned end to end.
SCC bridges that gap, the agility mid-market deals need, on transactions from £50m to £500m, with the engineering depth of a £3bn systems integrator and fifty years of infrastructure delivery behind it.
The team you meet is the team you get
Continuity matters more than most people realise. The senior people in the pitch are the senior people on the project, and the engineers who spot the risks in diligence are the engineers who mitigate them on the ground, from NDA to TSA exit day. No rotation. The same people throughout.
Two more commitments, our architectural recommendations are driven by the business outcome, not vendor quotas; we are vendor-agnostic with an opinion. And if something goes wrong, you hear about it first, no hidden delays and no surprises.
These promises are testable, ask for references and we will arrange the calls, under NDA. The practice is led by Gareth Baker, you deal with him and the Principals, not an account layer.
What it looks like in practice
The identifying detail has been removed. Each of these is a real engagement.
Retail carve-out
A PE-backed retail carve-out defined by misaligned incentives. The seller was funding the TSA and wanted out. The buyer had to approve every step. Platforms were heavily shared, and every month the separation ran was stranded cost. The outcome was a single plan that worked technically and commercially for both sides, and a TSA exit that came in on plan.
Public sector separation
A separation with almost no usable documentation of the estate. Legacy systems, undocumented dependencies, no clear picture of where one entity ended and the other began. The job was to establish enough clarity, quickly, to commit to a plan that would hold, then carry it out without taking the business offline.
Defence acquirer.
A PE-backed defence acquirer with no internal capacity to absorb what it had bought. The risk was not that the migration would fail. It was that no one would own the result once it was finished. The work was standing up an IT operation that could run the business the day after we left.
Five questions for anyone pitching this work
Partner selection for the technology workstream comes down to a handful of answers. Put these to every provider on the list, including us.
- Will the team in the pitch still be on the project in month six?
- Who personally owns the TSA exit date?
- What did your last technical diligence find that changed the price?
- When did you last build a NewCo clean rather than clone the legacy estate, and why?
- What is your Day 1 security position before any network is bridged?
How an engagement starts
Diagnose before we prescribe, every first conversation is a second opinion, not a pitch.
You likely have a diligence report or an integration plan in place already. The test that matters is if it holds under real conditions. For active deals we offer a Red Flag Review: a senior architect stress-tests your current plan against our execution baseline and flags the unmitigated risks before capital is committed. Rapid, fixed-scope, under NDA. If the plan is sound, you will have confirmed it for very little. If it is not, you will have found out while it is still cheap to fix.
We operate primarily under NDA, to discuss a specific mandate or to review our credentials in retail, manufacturing, the public sector or aerospace and defence, contact the practice leadership directly.
The No-Nonsense Guide to M&A
A field guide for people doing deals. Where value leaks between the deal model and the estate, why the help on offer often makes the problem harder, and what it looks like when the technology workstream is owned end to end. Written for the people responsible for the technology in a deal, and worth forwarding to the people responsible for the deal itself.
FAQs
We use one of the Big 4 for everything.
The Big 4 are built for the £2bn PLC carve-out and they are good at it. We are built for the £50m to £500m transaction, where our economics let Principals stay on the work from diligence to exit.
We can do this in-house.
Your IT team can probably do the work. The harder question is doing it on top of the day job, to a timetable set by the deal, on information that is never complete. Those conditions quietly set incumbent teams up to fail. We carry the transaction workstream so your team can keep the business running.
We already have an IT partner.
Keep them. M&A is an edge case for a business-as-usual partner, and it needs deal fluency they were never asked to have. We run the transaction workstream alongside them and hand back a stable estate when the TSA closes.
Speak to a specialist
Email-borne threats are evolving faster than rule-based defences can follow. Our specialists will assess your current environment and show where behavioural AI closes the gaps. A practical conversation, no obligation.
