According to Jon Herbert, Head of Acquisition Finance at Lloyds TSB: "The business was established 11 years ago and has become very successful, achieving rapid growth in the last few years on the back of a clearly focused strategy. We provide highly leveraged debt in the European buy-out market, and it's vital for us to be able to model deal structures and borrower financial projections in a timely and effective manner. Our existing spreadsheet-based systems have served the business well in the first stage of its development, but we need something more sophisticated to support the next stage."

Lloyds TSB chose to invest in Hyperion Strategic Finance and Hyperion Essbase to meet their requirements. Hyperion Strategic Finance is a powerful strategic financial modeling application that lets Lloyds TSB Acquisition Finance executives quickly assess the full financial impact of alternative strategies.

Rather than spending valuable time on building and maintaining spreadsheet modelling tools, Hyperion Strategic Finance delivers packaged financial modeling and forecasting, giving their people the ability to better spend their time evaluating lending strategies, investigating contingency plans, and understanding the impact of these strategies and plans on the division's long-term investment performance.

Hyperion Strategic Finance allows organisations like Lloyds TSB Acquisition Finance to produce financial models with integrity and transparency to minimise risk and create efficiencies. Around 60 users will initially benefit from the use of this software.

Continues Herbert: "Rather than have information scattered amongst a large number of spreadsheets, we want to have all the data in one place - and to use this information more effectively. We gained excellent references from other banks who were using the software. It has opened up new vistas for us."

The combination of Hyperion Strategic Finance and Hyperion Essbase will replace Lloyds TSB's existing systems for portfolio monitoring and trend analysis. Comments Herbert: "Our current systems don't easily support such analysis - we have a lot of valuable data, and want to make smarter use of it to support decisions on individual deals, the mix of our portfolio and the overall business strategy. Ultimately, we want to be able to prepare a detailed portfolio report in seconds!

"We gave representatives from across Acquisition Finance the opportunity to evaluate the software before we purchased. The feedback was very positive: it was collectively agreed that Hyperion Strategic Finance would strengthen our credit assessment and monitoring processes. And, as Lloyds TSB prepares for Basel II accreditation, a deeper understanding of the historic trends in our portfolio will help us enhance the design and calibration of our rating tool. Our goal is to integrate Hyperion Strategic Finance seamlessly with the rating tool - something we couldn't do previously. Overall, we're excited by the possibilities this software will open up, and we look forward to working with Hyperion as we continue to develop our business."