The Wire Choreography on Closing Day

Practice acquisition closing days look choreographed only from the outside. Inside, they involve six wires that need to land in a specific order, each with its own approval matrix and cutoff time. Get the order wrong and the close slips a day. Slip a day and the seller renegotiates, the lender re-issues funding, or you pay a per diem on the LOI extension.

This article is the playbook for closing in one banking day.

The Six Wires

Wire one: funding from the lender into your acquisition escrow account. Has to land before your other wires can go out. Lender cutoff is usually 11 AM EST on Fedwire.

Wire two: equity contribution from your sponsor into the same escrow. Often pre-funded the day before, but confirm balance is sufficient before any outbound wires.

Wire three: working capital adjustment to the seller. Calculated from the closing balance sheet. Typically goes out by 1 PM EST.

Wire four: purchase price minus escrow holdback to the seller. The big one. Goes out by 2 PM EST.

Wire five: closing costs to legal, accounting, and broker accounts. Multiple smaller wires, batch them after 3 PM.

Wire six: initial funding from your new PC operating account at the platform's bank. This is the first deposit into the newly opened account, demonstrating operational continuity. By end of day.

Pre-Close Checklist

Five things that need to be done 48 hours before closing.

One: confirm Fedwire cutoff times at your bank. Get them in writing. Different banks have different cutoffs, and Friday cutoffs are sometimes earlier than weekday cutoffs.

Two: pre-load all wire instructions into your banking platform. Recipient details, account numbers, amount placeholders. Validate each instruction with the seller's counsel.

Three: confirm signer availability. If your platform requires CFO plus CEO for wires above $2M, make sure both are reachable closing day.

Four: open the new PC operating account at the platform's bank. This is the destination for wire six. If you wait until closing day to open this, you slip.

Five: confirm lender funding timing. Get the exact wire reference number and expected arrival time.

What Goes Wrong

Three patterns we see repeatedly.

One: lender funding lands later than expected, and your bank rejects outbound wires because the escrow balance is insufficient at the time of submission. Fix: confirm funding arrival before submitting outbound wires, not before initiating them.

Two: a signer is unreachable for dual approval. Fix: pre-load wires with both required approvers, have them queue-approve from anywhere.

Three: the seller's account details change last minute and the wire bounces. Fix: re-verify wire instructions by phone with the seller's CFO on the morning of close. Never trust email-only changes.

Choosing a Bank That Closes the Same Day

Not every bank can support same-day closes. The capabilities to look for:

• Fedwire cutoff at 4 PM EST or later

• Same-day signer approval workflow, mobile-accessible

• Account opening for the acquired PC in under 24 hours

• Wire desk reachable by phone if anything escalates

• Flat per-wire fee (Lemma is $15) so cost is not the gating factor

If your current bank does not check all five boxes, you are slipping closes you should be making.

The Day After

The first day post-close, your treasury team has three jobs.

1. Confirm all six wires settled and reconciled. Match each one against the closing schedule.

2. Redirect payer EFT enrollments to the new PC operating account. The clock on collections starts the moment EFTs are routed to your platform, not the moment the deal closes.

3. Enable sweeps on the new PC account. Default config should match your platform standard. Confirm activation.

By end of day one post-close, the new entity is operationally integrated. If any of those three things take more than a day, your banking architecture is creating drag on your M&A engine.