Will your finance technology handle the M&A wave?

The news headlines aren’t about GDP lately — they’re about deals. A recent article from The Economist found that America has entered a new merger wave, energized by confident executives, plentiful capital, and an AI boom reshaping corporate structures. Mega-deals are stacking up, and every transaction lands on finance’s desk as rapidly as it hits the ticker. In fact, “the number of mega-deals — mergers, acquisitions (M&A) and investments worth more than 10 billion — announced this year is approaching a record high” with the third quarter being the busiest in history so far. 

But the challenge for finance and accounting teams isn’t just preparing pro formas; it’s absorbing these new entities, standardizing charts of accounts, mapping local ledgers to the corporate chart, and aligning fiscal calendars and accounting policies — all while producing trusted consolidated actuals on tight timelines, with auditors and regulators watching.

M&A challenges at a glance

A surge of large, complex deals compresses timelines and amplifies the most painful points of financial consolidation. To thrive in this mega-deal era, your team must be able to absorb new entities quickly while maintaining accuracy, auditability, and compliance across regions.

In an ideal world, you are able to:

• Onboard new entities in days. New subsidiaries need to be brought into the cycle fast, with clear ownership structures reflected immediately.
• Harmonize chart of accounts. Local ledgers must map to corporate rollups with transparent lineage and controls.
• Automate intercompany eliminations at scale. More cross-entity activity requires automated matching and eliminations.
• Apply flexible ownership logic. Partial stakes, step acquisitions, and divestitures demand transparency in recalculating ownership rules.
• Manage multi-currency and align calendars. Additional currencies and differing fiscal years increase translation and consolidation adjustments.
• Reconcile corporate and local statutory reporting. GAAP, IFRS, and local requirements all need to reconcile to one governed source of truth.
• Coauthor financial narratives and disclosures. Board books and filings come fast and must tie back to controlled data with version control and audit trails.
• Revise quickly with finance-owned adaptability. Processes and models must change without heavy IT bottlenecks as the deal thesis evolves.

Bottom line: the deal flywheel is spinning faster, so your consolidation process has to absorb change without slowing reporting or risking control.

The cost of waiting

M&A waves don’t pause for your month-end. Deal structures are getting more intricate, increasing concentration risk and making unwinds harder if markets turn. A consolidation environment that can’t keep pace creates reporting delays and compliance exposure precisely when stakeholders expect clarity. This lag doesn’t just impact statutory reporting; it also limits your ability to quickly forecast and update plans to accommodate the acquisition. Strategic decisions like resource allocation are delayed or based on guesswork when your FP&A teams lack a reliable, consolidated baseline.

Modernizing now means you can integrate entities in days, sustain control and auditability, and deliver trusted, narrative-rich reporting — even as your org chart evolves. And with high-yield spreads hovering near pre-2008 levels and an “eighth” merger wave underway, the pressure on finance to integrate quickly will only intensify. The Economist also warns that AI-era cross-holdings and opaque deal terms could magnify unwind risk, raising the stakes for clean data lineage and transparent ownership logic.

Financial consolidation built for fast M&A activity

When the deal cycle accelerates, finance needs a consolidation engine that scales with change and stays finance-owned. The Anaplan Financial Consolidation application is purpose-built to help your company absorb newly acquired subsidiaries in days, automate complexity, and produce governed, financial and narrative-ready results.

With Anaplan, your company experiences:

• Rapid acquisition onboarding. Pre-built models, mapping templates, and finance-owned configuration let you harmonize charts, policies, and fiscal calendars fast — so the new entity appears in your next cycle effortlessly.
• Automation for real-world complexity. Intercompany eliminations, multi-currency translation, partial/step ownership, and consolidation adjustments are systemized with transparent logic and drill-through.
• Finance-owned, no-code control. Your team immediately adapts structures and rules through an intuitive user interface (UX), no waiting on IT, while still maintaining enterprise-grade security and control.
• One governed source for corporate and statutory. Deliver GAAP, IFRS, and local views from the same controlled data foundation, with audit trails and lineage intact.
• Proven cycle-time gains. Our customers report up to 90% faster financial consolidation cycles and reduced audit effort, freeing capacity for data-driven analysis.

And best-in-class financial consolidation isn't just about speeding up the production of your financial statements. It's about what you can do next. Quickly generating trusted consolidated actuals provides the foundation for more agile and accurate financial planning. With a unified view of the newly combined entity, your finance team can immediately model new scenarios to understand the real-time impact of an acquisition on revenue, costs, and profitability and create more accurate forecasts based on reliable, up-to-the-minute consolidated actuals.

Don’t let your consolidation process be a bottleneck in your M&A strategies. With Anaplan, you can connect the acquired entity’s ledgers, map to corporate rollups, configure ownership, and land governed results in the same reporting period — keeping regulators, auditors, and leadership aligned while the market watches.