How Hrm Supports Misys Mergers and Acquisition Strategy

1. Introduction

1. Organizational background

“Established in 1979, Misys Financial Systems or Misys PLC has been supporting and delivering the broadest range of banking solutions for thousands of clients in the financial services industry for over three and a half decades in the midst of ever changing financial services landscape.” (Misys about, nd)[18]

“In 2004, Misys acquired IQ Financial Systems (IQFS), a New York based provider of commercial lending and capital market software (Loan IQ) from Deutsche Bank for $40M. In doing so, Misys extended its brand and footprint where their solutions are used by some of the world’s leading global financial institutions

• Including 47 of the world's 50 largest banks
• 16 of the top 25 syndicated loan book runners
• 12 of the top 20 asset managers
• More than 90 asset managers and hedge funds ” (Misys about, nd)[18]

1. Problem Situation

Ever since the acquisition of IQFS and even up to now, it has been Misys corporate strategy to make strategic acquisitions in order to enhance their solution offering to their client base. As such, mergers had become the norm and that there is a cloud of uncertainty that hangs over the organization from how the integration of the two firms to a single cohesive unit from employee engagement to standardizing talent management and performance management in terms of whether to apply the best practice or the best fit model given the situation.  

1. Literature Review

Two broad models have become particularly influential in the interpretation of HRM (Beardwell and Thompson, 1994:8-11) [3]. and are used commonly which are

1. Contingency or “Best Fit” – the matching model strategic HRM introduced by Michigan Business school which aligns to the hard model interpretation of HRM where the deployment of human resources are to meet business objectives and that they are different from one organization to another. (Devanna et al, 1984: 34) [10]
2. Universalism or “Best Practice” – the Harvard model unitarist approach or aligns to the soft model interpretation of HRM where it aims to get high performance through high commitment which will benefit and organization regardless of context (Beer et al., 1984)[6]

Whenever a takeover and acquisition has been made by Misys, integration is always emphasized at the fore-front of the activities. Misys adopted the latter or the best practice model in terms of introducing a common set of guidelines whenever there is a merger that occurs in order to integrate the newly acquired firm back to the processes and resources of the parent company. This could range from day to day areas such as office facilities, systems used, shared functions (i.e. finance, procurement and HR) to more strategic areas such as organization development, learning and development, business operating model to product roadmap.