Company History

F1F9 was set up in 1999 to provide high-quality spreadsheet training within the UK. As our client base grew rapidly, we recognised the need for a set of shared rules or recommendations that would provide guidance on how to produce spreadsheets that are flexible, effective, and can be picked up easily by multiple users within an organisation. These recommendations – now known as the FAST Modelling Standard – have gained international recognition among professional modellers and senior management alike.

In 2005, we expanded our services into model building and opened offices in New Delhi to accommodate our rapidly expanding team. We recruit promising graduates with excellent qualifications, who we train in-house to become experts in the technically specific skills our services require. This offshore development means we can offer clients technically advanced, impeccable service at affordable prices, and has provided us with opportunities to become involved in local programmes that promote social responsibility.  

Combining the FAST Standard with our new offshore modelling resource, we developed a new approach to spreadsheet services known as collaborative modelling. While traditional methods would burden a single modeller/analyst who was often working outside his or her area of expertise, collaborative modelling involves a professional modeller at our end and a professional analyst at the client end. This new concept allows the client to maintain control of the process while focusing on other pressing commercial issues. As a result, a new specialised profession of spreadsheet engineering has been developed.

Our ever-expanding team currently consists of 34 modellers based in Gurgaon, just South of New Delhi airport, and 10 onshore project managers based in the UK, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Including support staff, we are now an organisation of over 50 people. This makes us one of the largest, most experienced, dedicated financial modelling team in the world.

In April 2011, together with FAST co-developers Financial Mechanics, we vested the FAST Standard with an independent not-for-profit standards entity called the FAST Standard Organisation Ltd. In 2011, we were joined by the European team of our long-term sister company, Financial Mechanics, with the result that all training activities of Financial Mechanics outside the US now operate under the F1F9 brand. 

Through in-house and public face-to-face training courses, over the years F1F9 and Financial Mechanics have trained thousands of modellers from the world's leading financial companies to improve their modelling technique. More recently we have launched an online training academy which will allow our training services to reach a wider and larger audience at an affordable price.

F1F9 is today made up of two legal entities: a UK-registered company called F1F9 UK Limited; and a wholly-owned, India-registered company called F1F9 India Pvt Ltd.