How a 900-person fintech company eliminated $150K+ in redundant software licenses, reclaimed 40+ hours per week of manual reconciliation work, and unified their post-acquisition operations — in 10 weeks.
This mid-market fintech company had completed a significant acquisition eighteen months before engaging Clearfield. The combined organization had grown to 900 employees across three offices. By the time they came to us, the integration work had stalled — and the consequences were compounding daily.
The two legacy companies had been running on entirely different operational stacks. Finance had its own tools. Operations had three separate platforms that all purported to do the same thing. HR and procurement were still manually reconciling data between systems that didn't talk to each other. No one had made the call to pick a winner — so both stacks kept running, redundantly.
The result was $150,000+ per year in duplicate license costs, and a team of six ops analysts spending the majority of their time manually reconciling data that should have been unified automatically.
The mandate was clear: kill the redundancy. But the execution required navigating real constraints that a simple "choose one platform" decision couldn't solve.
They needed a partner who could architect the consolidation, build the integrations to make it work, and handle the internal politics with a neutral hand. That's what Clearfield does.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Annual software license spend | $260K+ (6 tools, double coverage) | $108K — $152K saved |
| Manual reconciliation hours / week | 40+ hrs/week (6 FTE analysts) | ~4 hrs/week — 90% reduction |
| Ops tools in active use | 6 overlapping platforms | 2 primary platforms unified |
| Data reconciliation errors / month | ~30–40 (manual entry across systems) | <3 (automated sync, zero manual entry) |
| Cross-team reporting latency | 3–5 business days (manual consolidation) | Same-day automated reporting |
| Ops analyst time on high-value work | ~20% (rest was data reconciliation) | ~85% (manual work eliminated) |
The client came in with a clear mandate and a long history of stalled initiatives. Previous attempts to consolidate had failed because the technical work and the political work were treated as separate problems. Clearfield treated them as one problem — which is the only way it actually gets solved.
We built the integrations, managed the migration, and navigated the stakeholder conversations that would have derailed an internal team without external cover. The consolidation completed on schedule. The ops team went from firefighting reconciliation errors to building the reporting layer they'd never had time for.
IP transferred to the client at completion. They own the full integration layer, the documentation, and the ability to extend it without us.
The Discovery Sprint is the first phase of the Method — the same framework that produced this result. One week. A written blueprint of your consolidation opportunity and the fastest path to execution. $2,500, fully credited if you build.
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