After 20 Years of ERP Consolidation, M&A Still Moves Faster Than Integration

The 21st century business corporation is frequently referred to as a single thing. Its executives speak in the singular: one company, one strategy, one balance sheet. Its annual report gathers thousands of employees, hundreds of bank accounts and perhaps dozens of legal entities into a coherent financial portrait.

But the business management playbook loves to wrap complex corporate workflows into simple-sounding initiatives. And as CFOs know well, organizational coherence is frequently an administrative achievement rather than an operating reality.

Years of acquisitions have left companies with multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, incompatible charts of accounts and supplier records that repeat, overlap or contradict one another. A business acquired in Germany may close its books on a different calendar from one in Texas. A subsidiary may recognize a supplier by its trading name while the parent records its legal entity, while payment approvals that require three signatures in one division may require only one elsewhere.

Corporate finance has spent much of the past two decades trying to remove these differences. The dominant theory of finance transformation was architectural: consolidate systems, standardize processes and create one authoritative source of financial data. One ledger architecture, one set of processes, one source of truth.

The trouble is that M&A moves according to the logic of markets, while integration moves according to the logic of systems projects. The first is opportunistic. The second is sequential, expensive and slow.

See also: The M&A Files: You Just Had an Acquisition — Now What?

The Office of the CFO Moves Finance Beyond the ERP

The original ERP ideal treated variation as a defect. If each business processed invoices, categorized expenses and managed suppliers differently, then the obvious solution was to eliminate the differences.

But companies can acquire several businesses in the time required to migrate one of them. Some acquired units are too small to justify the disruption. Others depend on specialized systems that do not fit neatly into the parent’s template. Still others may be divested before a migration can produce a return. The enterprise keeps changing while its integration plan remains fixed to an earlier version of the organization.

The first integration questions are therefore rarely about software elegance. They are about command.

Who can release funds? Which bank accounts remain active? What payments are due this week? Are supplier details valid? Can the parent see the acquired company’s liquidity? Are the same sanctions, tax and fraud controls being applied across the group?

These questions cannot wait for a multiyear ERP migration. They force finance teams to build a layer of visibility and governance above systems that remain distinct. That layer is becoming the new center of the finance stack.

Read also: The $100 Million CFO Doesn’t Keep Score. They Call the Plays.

Unlocking the Data Between Systems Starts with Payments

The most valuable information in corporate finance may increasingly reside not inside any single system, but in the movement among them. A centralized payment platform can see which entities pay which suppliers, through which accounts, under what terms and after which approvals. An accounts payable (AP) platform can see obligations before cash leaves the company. A treasury system can see the effect of those obligations across balances, currencies and legal entities.

In a company with several ERPs, for example, AP software can become an interpreter among different operating systems. It receives invoices in inconsistent formats, maps local accounting fields to corporate categories, applies common approval rules and returns validated transactions to the relevant ledger.

After all, what appears to be a data-quality problem is, in fact, a problem of financial authority. Before a company can decide when or how to pay, it must establish whom it is paying.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “When Controls Slow Commerce: The Data Behind Middle-Market Payment Friction,” the latest installment of the 2026 Certainty Project, found that many firms still struggle to protect transactions without delaying them. Execution failures, including incorrect or delayed payments, increased customer friction for 78% of CFOs.

This is why supplier onboarding is moving closer to the center of B2B payments. The most valuable payment asset may not be the rail that carries the money. It may be the verified identity record that precedes the transaction: the supplier’s legal status, bank credentials, tax information, payment preferences and relationship to the paying entity.

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