What a lender deck looks like.
The lender deck is the same credit as the information memorandum, told in slides — the version a lender walks through in the room and takes back to committee. This page sets out what the deck is for, what a credit team takes from it, and a full 31-slide specimen, built on a fictional borrower, to download and read.
The credit at presentation pace.
Where the IM is written to be read cold, the deck is built to present: the opportunity, the business and its market, the financials and forecast, the structure and the ask, carried by the charts that make the case at a glance. It leads the management meetings, anchors the questions, and after the room empties it keeps working — the deal team that liked the credit uses it to walk their colleagues through the story.
The deck never replaces the IM; the two travel together, with the model behind both. Every number in the deck agrees with the memorandum and the model to the pound, because the fastest way to lose a credit team is to show them the same business twice with different figures.
A story that survives the retelling.
In the room, a credit team is testing whether management knows its own business: the deck frames the questions, and the answers are what get assessed. They look for the shape of the credit in the first few slides — what the company does, what drives the cash, what the money is for — and for evidence rather than adjectives everywhere else: unit economics, customer cohorts, order books, the bridge from last year’s numbers to the forecast.
The second reading matters more. The deal team that takes the deck to committee needs it to answer the sceptical colleague who was not in the room, which is why a good deck carries the downside case and the mitigants on its own slides rather than leaving them to be asked for. A deck that only works with a presenter attached is a weaker document than it looks.
A full specimen deck, slide by slide.
The specimen below is a complete Solon lender deck on the same fictional borrower as the specimen IM — Northstar Components, a £10.5m refinancing — so the two can be read side by side as a pack. No real company, no live mandate, and nothing in it is an offer or advice. Note how it reads alongside the memorandum: shorter, visual, and built to present rather than to be read cold.