Excel Can Power Your Business—Or Hold It Back

Reduce risk, save time, and scale your operations with expert-built solutions.

A de Havilands, we design and build custom Excel solutions for mid-tier financial services firms that eliminate manual effort, reduce operational risk and free up your team to focus on high-value work.

Holly C.

Principal Consultant

I wanted to thank you again for all your help and advice... [it] has really been a gamechanger.

Excel Overload? We see this all the time.

Your team is reconciling accounts by copy-pasting between five spreadsheets—every week. One formula breaks, and it takes an hour to fix.

Sound familiar?

Our clients often come to us after years of layering one Excel fix on top of another. Complex workbook that have grown organically over many years to become real monsters.

Meanwhile your staff are wasting valuable hours on tedious work that should be automated.

That’s where we come in.

At one London asset manager, we reduced the workload of one analyst by 20%, freeing up 4 days a month.

Tailored Excel Solutions

Our Excel solutions have saved financial services firms thousands of hours and millions of dollars.

  • Tactical Excel solutions act as a bridge between your business’ immediate needs and your IT department’s ability to service them.
  • The return on your Excel investment is magnified when Excel works in an ecosystem of applications.
  • Excel can work with a broad range of applications and system including Web APIs, trading & business applications and other Microsoft Office applications.
  • Manual Excel-based processes can be automated to run in a fraction of the time with increased accuracy and reduced operational risk.
  • The time to deliver functioning solutions is far faster than traditional desktop or web-based alternatives.

Who We Work With

de Havilands is a specialist Excel consulting firm led by Marcus Syben, a 25-year industry veteran and Microsoft MVP. 

We specialise in helping mid-size financial services firms—typically with 20 to 100 staff, lean IT support, and operations that are heavily dependent on Excel. 

Many of our clients have a stable of Excel workbooks and processes upon which entire business processes, rightly or wrongly, depend.  

We have worked with:

  • Asset managers, options traders, FX traders, insurance brokers & underwriters amongst others
  • Fund managers, COOs, CTOs and CFOs who have inherited "Excel spaghetti" and "Frankensheets"
  • Underwriters, trading desks, compliance officers, and risk teams with tight deadlines

We specialise in:

  • Developing and implementing tactical Excel-based solutions to get you across the line while you seek to implement a more strategic solution.
  • Supporting, maintaining and enhancing your tactical Excel solutions 
  • Assisting your migration to a strategic solution by deciphering and documenting your existing Excel solutions which are earmarked for migration and retirement. 

What We Deliver

Every project is custom scoped and built. No off-the-shelf tools. No bloated systems. Just fast, reliable Excel-based solutions that reduce risk and reclaim your time.

Here’s what we build:

  • Automated reporting tools with built-in data validation
  • Dashboards integrating SQL, Power Query, or Power BI
  • Excel-to-Word mail merge automation for templated reports and documents
  • Excel-to-PowerPoint mail merge automation for templated reports 
  • Legacy macro upgrades to modern, maintainable formats
  • Modular financial models with robust user controls

Our solutions are:

  • Fully documented: we can provide, documented code, user documentation and video walkthroughs
  • Designed with your end-users in mind for ease of use and ease of maintenance
  • Built using Excel best practices from 25+ years in finance

Free Download

Discover How We Saved One London Asset Manager 4 Days a Month Automating 1 Process

With a 631% ROI, this case study shows how simple Excel automation saved one London asset manager 4 days, every month (that's 48 days a year) producing the client performance reports.

How it Works

Our process is structured but flexible—because no two clients are the same.

Call

Discovery Call

We take the time to understand how your team works and where the pain points are.

Scope

Scope & Proposal

We provide a fixed-priced quote (or hourly if preferred), based on clearly defined outcomes.

Build

Build & Test

We work iteratively in short sprints with regular check-ins to ensure alignment and usability.

Deploy

Deploy & Support

We hand over clean, documented solutions—or offer ongoing support through our Excel Help Desk.

See Some Examples

Download our portfolio which presents a range of prior projects or view them online by clicking here.

Free Download

Unlock Proven Excel Solutions for Financial Services Efficiency

Discover how Excel automation can drive measurable results. This exclusive portfolio showcases over 30 high-impact projects, each designed to streamline workflows, save time, and reduce operational risks for financial services firms. Download now to see real examples of how we’ve helped firms like yours achieve ROI gains of up to 631%.

Why Choose de Havilands?

We’re not generalist developers or offshore freelancers. We’re specialist Excel consultants with deep domain knowledge of financial services.

Led by Marcus Syben, a Microsoft Excel MVP with 25+ years of experience, we know what matters:

  • Clean architecture, not messy formulas
  • End-user design, not just developer convenience
  • Documented, maintainable, audit-ready work
  • Business value, not just “finished” files

We’ve helped clients:

  • Eliminate thousands of hours of tedious, "soul destroying", manual Excel tasks.
  • Reduce regulatory risk with audit-ready outputs
  • Cut costs by streamlining and automating multi-step workflows
  • Achieve a £170 million RWA reduction in one case
  • Save 4 days a month, every month - or 20% of one FTEs entire workload - automating client performance reporting with a 631% ROI.

Most of our clients operate in regulated financial services. While we don’t name names, we’ve helped firms across asset management, investment banking, retail & commercial banking, FX trading, insurance, private equity and risk management transform their Excel landscape.

What Our Clients Say

I didn’t appreciate how easy it was to work with Marcus until I had to work with other developers

Jamie C. ● Management Consultant

Very rarely can someone interpret ideas so well as Marcus has.

Frank F. ● Company Director

I wanted to thank you again for all your help and advice .. [it].. has really been a gamechanger.

Holly C ● Principal Consultant

Is this for You?

We often hear:

  • "It takes us days to compile a month-end report".
  • "The Excel workbook this process depends on was built by someone who left 3 years ago and no one really understands it."
  • "One formula breaks and we lose half-a-day trying to figure out why."

If this sounds familiar, you're not alone.

You might be a good fit for a tailored Excel solution if:

  • Your Excel files are slow, crash-prone, or huge
  • You rely on a few "spreadsheet heroes" who built key Excel tools (and have since left)
  • Staff are copy-pasting between reports or reconciling by hand
  • Your macros were written years ago and no one dares touch them
  • You need to integrate Excel with databases, APIs, or other applications
  • You want automation—but not a full IT rebuild

We’re not here to sell you software you don’t need. We’re here to fix what’s broken and build what works.

How We Price Projects

We offer two pricing models depending on your needs:

Fixed-Fee Projects

For clearly defined solutions with a measurable result, we provide a transparent, fixed-price quote.

Hourly Projects

For evolving requirements, we bill in 10-hour blocks, with regular checkpoints so you’re never surprised.

Book a 30-Minute Excel Strategy Call

This isn’t a sales call—it’s a discovery session. We’ll review your current Excel setup and highlight opportunities to save time, reduce risk, and improve performance.

Before you book: We work best with financial services firms that rely heavily on Excel and want to fix or scale their most important spreadsheets.

Complete Our 2-Minute Assessment to see if we’re the right fit.

Let's Talk

Need Ongoing Excel Support?

Many financial services firms don't need entire Excel-based solutions developed but would benefit from 10 to 20 hours a month of specialist Excel support to help alleviate the burden on their staff.

If that's you, our Excel Help Desk service, may be what you need.

It's a subscription-based support service designed for financial teams who reply on Excel but don't have specialist internal support or dedicated Excel developers.

Excel Help Desk for Financial Services

On-demand, expert Excel support for firms that can’t afford errors or delays.

The de Havilands Excel Help Desk gives you direct access to expert Excel consultants, so your team can focus on what they do best—without spreadsheet bottlenecks holding them back.

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