Roles

FMAE for Advisory Firms

Advisory firms — M&A advisers, transaction support teams, restructuring practices, and financial due diligence teams — routinely encounter financial models as part of client engagements. The models they work with have been built by their clients, by counterparties, or by target companies. The quality of those models is variable, often unknown, and always consequential. The core problem is scope and time. An advisory team engaged on a complex transaction may have days rather than weeks to form a view on a financial model's reliability.

FMAE for Banks

Banks and project finance lenders make credit decisions on the basis of financial models they did not build and cannot fully verify using their own internal resources. The borrower, their advisers, or the project company produce the model. The bank's credit team receives it, reviews it, and either approves the credit or requires changes. The quality of that review determines the quality of the credit decision. The fundamental tension for banks is this: the more complex and material the transaction, the more the bank needs to understand the model's reliability — and the less time the credit timeline allows for the bank to do so.

FMAE for CFOs

A CFO's finance function runs on financial models. Investment appraisals, debt capacity analyses, refinancing scenarios, board reporting, covenant compliance calculations, cash flow forecasts — each of these depends on a spreadsheet or model that was built by someone in the team, typically under time pressure, usually without independent review. The CFO is accountable for the quality of these outputs. When the investment committee approves a transaction on the basis of a financial model, the CFO has typically represented — implicitly or explicitly — that the model is reliable. When a board receives financial projections, those projections come from models that the CFO's team has built and run.

FMAE for Developers

Developers — real estate developers, infrastructure sponsors, energy project developers, and mixed-use development companies — build financial models as the primary analytical tool for every project they pursue. The development model is how a project gets financed: it is the document that tells lenders whether the project is bankable, tells equity investors whether it meets their return threshold, and tells the developer's own board whether the project should proceed. The consequences of getting that model wrong are significant. An overstated equity IRR leads to a board approval that should not have been given. An understated construction cost leads to a debt size that leaves the developer short of funds.

FMAE for Family Offices

Family offices manage concentrated pools of private capital. A single investment error in a poorly constructed financial model can compound across a portfolio and cause irreversible capital loss. This page explains why financial model auditing is a critical discipline for family offices, what types of errors typically appear in models submitted to family office investment teams, and how deterministic model auditing addresses those risks.

FMAE for Financial Modellers

Financial modellers build the models that lenders, investment committees, and boards rely on for material decisions. The modeller who builds a model is also, structurally, its least reliable reviewer — not for lack of skill, but because self-review cannot substitute for independent testing, a distinction addressed on the Financial Model Auditing page. A modeller preparing a model for external submission needs a fast, systematic way to check their own work before someone else does, and to know their model will hold up under scrutiny.

FMAE for Government Agencies

Government agencies and multilateral-funded procurement bodies evaluating infrastructure and PPP tenders face a specific fairness problem that private lenders do not: they must assess financial models submitted by multiple competing bidders, on a basis that is not just accurate but demonstrably consistent and defensible across every submission. A procurement decision that cannot show it applied the same standard to every bidder's model is exposed to challenge, independent of whether the eventual decision was actually correct.

FMAE for Investment Committees

An investment committee approves capital allocations on the basis of a model's output — a projected return, a valuation, a sensitivity range — almost always without the time, access, or mandate to independently verify the model itself. The committee is, in effect, accepting the model risk embedded in every submission it approves, whether or not that risk has been made explicit. This page addresses what an investment committee needs from model evidence, and how independent structural verification changes what a committee is actually approving.

FMAE for PE Firms

Private equity firms make acquisition decisions on the basis of financial models they typically did not build — the target company's own model, an adviser's model, or a model inherited from a previous owner. Portfolio companies arrive from different sources with inconsistent modelling practices, and a firm managing a portfolio of positions carries model risk not just in any single deal, but in aggregate across the fund. The diligence timeline rarely allows for a full manual audit of every model a deal team encounters, and the inconsistency does not stop at closing — it continues into portfolio company reporting and eventual exit.

FMAE for Project Finance Teams

A project finance transaction runs the same financial model through many hands over months: the sponsor's team, financial and legal advisers, lenders' technical and credit teams, and rating agencies where relevant, each revising, querying, and relying on it as terms are negotiated. The model that reaches financial close is rarely the same file that started the process, and every round of revision under deadline pressure is an opportunity for a structural inconsistency to be introduced without anyone specifically checking for it before the next version goes out.