The Globe and Mail reports in its Friday edition that when Royal Bank of Canada closed its acquisition of HSBC Bank Canada, the largest domestic banking takeover on record, it had to move billions of dollars of customer money and data off HSBC's platforms and onto its own in a single weekend -- a technological feat that helped it to win the $13.5-billion auction for the highly coveted business. The Globe's Stefanie Marotta writes that usually, when two banks merge, the acquirer spends several months adapting the acquired company's products, services, employees and customers to its own businesses before fully moving them onto its platforms. Often, the buyer scoops up the target's technology. For this transaction, however, HSBC Canada's British parent company wanted to keep its proprietary technology. So RBC agreed to move billions of dollars and streams of customers and employee data from HSBC's system onto its own all at once. RBC closed the financial transaction on March 29, and immediately started transferring data. After some practice runs, over the Easter long weekend, a few thousand employees split 12-hour shifts to work through the 12,000 technical steps required to migrate HSBC's customers and employees in bulk.