Ninety days since Bendigo Bank kicked off its merger with the Bank of Adelaide, chief information officer Andrew Watts has been able to point to a number of small advances in integrating the two entities.By the end of February, Bendigo had extended its video conferencing capabilities to Adelaide and it had averted an outlay for a substantial new router to support network traffic to the South Australia head office by extending existing resources.These gains represent an encouraging psychological boost, first, because prevailing wisdom equates speed with success in integrating information systems following mergers and acquisitions.Second, because it goes towards offsetting an initial one-off merger cost of between $50 million and $60 million that will be partly incurred by assimilating the technology systems.The new technology investments will be largely directed towards bringing duplicated systems together and increasing system capacity in some areas to support the larger business.But the bank has targeted around $65 million in savings, with 80 per cent of these synergies within two years, so any savings at this stage helps."These early-win projects are minor accomplishments in the greater task of integrating the systems but they've saved money for the organisation," says Watts, who was appointed last December to run technology for what is now Australia's seventh-largest lender by market value, with total assets worth about $50 billion.The merged business supports more than 1.3 million customers through 391 branches and a network of 640 ATMs across Australia, as well as around 50 wholesale partners. The merged bank will have at its disposal an IT budget of between $45 million and $50 million over the next 18 months to accomplish its objectives."Essentially, our plan is to operate one IT team, working from two key sites - Bendigo and Adelaide."This has some major advantages - we have access to a larger talent pool, we can provide more diverse opportunities for staff and achieve greater benefits of scale."The major project is really bringing the core banking system and the data systems together."The complexity of successful integration in the context of M&As cannot be overstated but the Bendigo and Adelaide venture has been made somewhat simpler by the fact that the two banks have different but complementary business models based on the same core banking platform.Adelaide has an uncommon, wholesale business model while Bendigo is strong in retail banking. That has delivered relatively clear lines of demarcation.But in getting any operation to run smoothly as a single unit after a merger, a major question is to what extent to integrate the technologies and how to eliminate redundancy.One of Watt's first objectives after his appointment was to put in place a core integration team to assess which areas of the combined IS departments would stay and which would go, "making sure we had strong business engagement to identify key projects".This is still being finalised but once complete, the bank will decide which vendors to retain.The bank's overall aim is to limit changes in complementary areas such as Adelaide's portfolio and margin lending and wealth