TESTIMONIALS

TESTIMONIALS

Read how Advantage helps clients address globalization, the proliferation of financial instruments, increases in deal scope and complexity, and continually changing regulatory mandates.

Sweetwater Wind Project, Texas

Babcock & Brown was awarded an American Wind Energy Association Financier of the Year award for its role in the Sweetwater transaction and two other wind projects. "We utilize Advantage's search functionality extensively in modeling our complex partnership structures. Its ability to simultaneously solve for multiple variables at the push of a button allows us to be the only deal party that can calculate unique solution sets, and thus control the analytical process."
Cornelius Jackson (San Francisco)
Senior Financial Analyst with over 8 years of financial structuring experience

Railcar Portfolio Acquisition

BBRM identified an opportunity to acquire a portfolio of assets from a railcar leasing company and to add value through more efficient financing sourced from the Japanese operating lease market. "... this is another one of those deals that simply could not have been done without Advantage. This was a portfolio of 665 used railcars, broken down into five different groups based on car type and age. Each of the five groups had its own debt constraints, depreciation, lease expiry, FMV, yield requirement, etc., and there were additional constraints at the portfolio level on the debt, yield, and loss ratio. Advantage allowed us to meet all of these constraints and target an agreed portfolio price by optimizing both the costs paid per car and the leverage per group - an impossible task in anything but Advantage."
Steve Ince (San Francisco)
Senior Financial Analyst with over 7 years of financial structuring experience

Enhanced Japanese Leases

Numerous aircraft financings making use of the Japanese equity market on behalf of Aer Lingus, Iberia Airlines, Icelanair, KLM Airlines and other airlines. "We have used Advantage for about fives years now. It was a clear winner for structuring our complex Japanese lease transactions. The first model we built allowed us to improve results by making it easier to understand a counter-intuitive problem that had dogged us for some time. We have continued with Advantage over the years because it is easier to make changes to models safely. We have a lot more confidence in the reliability of the results. Solving for multiple variables with optimisation in Advantage is fast and speeds up the structuring process. Plus, and this is very important to us, it is much easier for more than one analyst to own and work on the same model."
Gerry O'Donohue (London)
Chartered Accountant with over 15 years of experience in structuring transactions

German Tax Modeling

In Germany, their Federal taxes and Trade taxes come with detailed rules and tests that make financial modeling difficult at best. Advantage's intrinsic ability to handle taxes generally makes this an easier task. Plus, the capability for analysts to create their own custom tax instruments in Advantage meant that the complexity of German taxes could be captured and made part of the Advantage tool box under an analyst's control. "Advantage was a true advantage to me in German tax-based analysis. In less than 50% of my deal related time, I was able to do a similar amount of analysis as two people would do in another shop here in Germany. This was only possible due to the wonderful Advantage model that we had built. In so far as tax anywhere is concerned, and especially in Germany, Advantage makes the most complicated tax issues easier to model."
John Morello (Munich)
Senior Financial Analyst with over 16 years of experience

Real Estate Joint Venture

Long-term 50 year real estate joint venture investment.
"Modeling this joint venture had a number of daunting obstacles. There were 50 years of monthly projections with many different cash and tax attributes. Accurately modeling construction expenditures, revenues, fixed and variable expenses, deposit and investment accounts, financing flows as well as different equity distribution agreements was mind boggling. Advantage's ability to easily handle both the cash and tax attributes of each economic flow provided me with the tools to get the job done. Advantage's built-in tax accrual handling saved me from writing a lot of nasty formulas. And Advantage's reporting facility made the creation of reports (annual vs monthly) a breeze. I could have completed this model in Excel but it would have taken much more time and would have been much less flexible and accurate."
Eric Wu (San Francisco)
Senior Financial Analyst with over 22 years of experience