Use case · Corporate finance & treasury
How do I forecast our interest cost for next year's budget?
It's the annual budget round. Every floating-rate facility in the group needs an interest assumption for next year — and the number in the model right now is last year's average rate, rolled forward. Or, as one finance team put it: somebody got a curve from somewhere, it went in the model, and it stays there until somebody realises it's out of date. The forward curve says rates are going somewhere else entirely: the market has already voted against your assumption, and the budget you're about to present doesn't know it yet.
Last updated: July 2026
Forecast next year's interest cost off the forward curve for your debt's benchmark — EURIBOR, SONIA or SOFR, at the facility's actual reset tenor (1M, 3M, 6M or 12M) — not a static prior-year average. The Excel add-in feeds the curve straight into your budget model, at monthly or quarterly steps to match your payment dates, and refreshes daily. BlueGamma is an interest rate data and pricing platform used by 80+ financial institutions for swap rates, forward curves and cap pricing across 30+ currencies.
How you're probably doing it now
Most corporate finance teams with floating-rate debt build the budget one of four ways — and each one has the same flaw: it tells you where rates were, not where the market expects them to go.
"We use a static forecast which limits our ability to provide good forecasts" … "We don't have a manual approach. That's the problem."
— corporate finance team at a Portuguese transport group (70-company group, annual debt plans built on the prior year's average cost of capital)
Last year's average, rolled forward
One static number for every facility and every year of the plan — or its system cousin: the portfolio platform pulls today's spot rate and, in one private credit manager's words, "uses today's rate forever, basically".
Ignores every rate rise or cut the market has already priced in. Every projected reset is priced off one frozen number — "not accurate, especially if rates are moving".
Free websites & central bank data
Grab something off the Bank of England or ECB website — "a little bit ad hoc" — or hover over a chart on a free site and pick off data points by hand, because the download is locked.
Historical fixings or hover-only charts; no tenor curves, no as-of-date control, typically no commercial licence. One renewables analyst rebuilds a curve monthly in a DIY Excel calculator from a free site — and holds it flat after year 10, because that's where the free data stops.
The bank's emailed projections
Ask your lending bank to send over the terminal projections they can see and you can't.
They typically stop at around two years — useless for a five- or ten-year plan — arrive on the bank's schedule, and come from the counterparty to your own financing.
A premium market-data terminal
All the data you could ever want — bonds, equities, commodities — for one budgeting input.
Roughly $2–3k per month for one forward curve — and the standard forward screens output annual tenors, not the monthly or quarterly points a debt-service forecast actually needs. One real-estate DCM team couldn't get monthly granularity out of theirs at all.
How teams describe this
Verbatim, from finance and treasury teams who came to BlueGamma with exactly this task:
"In the projections, we're kind of just using the last rate… which obviously — there's real rate movements — isn't accurate."
Private credit manager at a New York special-opportunities fund, with SOFR exposure on 80–90% of the book
"Somebody's got a curve from somewhere, right? That goes in a model. It stays there until somebody realises that it's out of date — and it only gets changed when we get the swap profile, literally on financial close."
Founder of a solar-and-battery developer (former IPP executive), on the budget process
"At the moment we're just kind of trying to grab something off the Bank of England website, which is… a little bit ad hoc."
Treasury analyst at a UK specialist bank — a two-person treasury team forecasting cost of funds for the 1- and 2-year savings market
"OK, you can't download the data. But you can hover over it and pick off certain data points that you're looking for — and that was it for a while."
Finance lead at an Irish SME & agricultural lender, forecasting EURIBOR five years out across €154m of facilities
"Prior to this refi we had a five-year bond, so the rate was fixed. We never really thought about it… and now with the refi we're floating."
VP of corporate development at a listed gaming company, month one of living with a £270m floating-rate refinancing
"I needed to pull a SONIA forward rate curve. And it's one of those things that's almost impossible to get, unfortunately."
Director at a boutique investment bank advising listed real-asset funds
Forward curve → budget model, in six steps
The forward curve is the market's traded expectation of where your benchmark fixes, period by period, years into the future. Here's how it replaces the static assumption:
Pick the benchmark and the reset tenor your debt actually uses
EURIBOR, SONIA or SOFR — then the tenor from the facility agreement: 1M, 3M, 6M or 12M. Each tenor has its own curve, and they diverge: on one recent day the 5-year forward was 2.57% on a 1-month basis and 2.75% on a 6-month basis — almost 10bp apart before you've assumed anything. The same workflow covers BBSW, CORRA, SAIBOR, NIBOR and 30+ currencies for the AUD, CAD, SAR or NOK facilities in the group.
Match the curve's granularity to the loan's payment frequency
A quarterly-paying facility needs a projected fixing for every reset — "roughly, what's the rate I'm gonna pull for a reset three months from now, six months from now, one year, one and a half years", as one private credit manager framed it. Pull the curve at monthly or quarterly steps rather than the annual tenors standard terminal screens output; one real-estate DCM lead told us this granularity was the reason he switched: "don't get rid of that feature".
Pull the curve into your budget model with the Excel add-in
Install the BlueGamma add-in from the Microsoft App Store, then write a formula — index, tenor, valuation date, start date — and the forward rate lands in the cell. Point one formula at each interest period in next year's plan: the projected fixing plus your margin, applied to the outstanding notional, is your interest line.
Let it refresh daily — and re-run after central bank moves
The formulas re-pull automatically, so the budget model (and every reforecast) always reflects the live curve — no more downloading, averaging and re-keying. When a central bank announcement moves the whole strip, the next refresh shows what the forecast looks like today; one infrastructure investor re-runs the model after every Fed announcement, another treasury team revised its whole SONIA outlook off the back of a gilt sell-off. Lock the valuation date to a past date to reproduce exactly what the market said when the budget was approved.
Run multi-year plans, refi timing and hedge scenarios off the same curve
The curve extends decades out — well past the ~2-year horizon of a bank's emailed projections — so a 10-year fund model can say "in 2030 the market expectation for SONIA is X" with a source behind it. Blend partial-hedge scenarios (75% swapped, 25% floating) into one all-in rate, price the expected cost on the long-term refi of a mini-perm before the term sheet lands, and run acquisition models off the same market-consistent numbers as the budget — one source, no internal inconsistency.
Graduate to the API when you're ready to automate
When the process is proven, call the get_forward_curve endpoint once a day, store the curve in your database, and feed the ERP, treasury system or lending platform directly — replacing the "one sources and inputs, the other checks and approves" two-person morning routine some finance teams still run by hand. A common path: Excel add-in for this budget round, CSV upload to the ERP in the interim, API connector later.
For this task: how the options compare
| Prior-year average | Free websites / central bank data | The bank's projections | Premium market-data terminal | BlueGamma | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forward-looking? | No — backward by definition | Mostly not — historical fixings, or hover-only forward charts | Yes | Yes | Yes — full forward curve |
| How far out | — | ~10 years, then you hold it flat | ~2 years, typically | Decades | Decades — past 2050 |
| Tenor curves (1M/3M/6M/12M) | No — one blended number | No — fixings, not curves | Whatever they choose to send | Yes | Yes — all four, per benchmark |
| Monthly / quarterly points | No | No | No | Annual tenors on standard screens | Yes — matched to payment frequency |
| Refresh | Annually, by hand | Manual pick-off each time | When you ask (and they answer) | Live | Live in-app; daily auto-refresh in Excel & API |
| Into the budget model | Typed in | Copy-paste / hover-and-key | Re-keyed from an email or PDF | Terminal seat + extract limits | Excel add-in formulas; API into the ERP |
| Licensed for commercial use | — | Generally not | Licensed to the bank, not to you | Yes (per seat) | Yes |
| Price anchor | Free (you pay in forecast error) | Free | Free (you pay in relationship goodwill) | ~$2–3k / month per seat | Monthly subscription — web app + Excel add-in |
If you also need bond, equity or commodity data, a terminal earns its keep. If the job is rate assumptions for budgets, plans and deal models, it's a cannon to shoot a fly.
Teams in exactly this seat
From real evaluation calls
The finance team at a Portuguese transport group — 70 companies, one integrated ERP — budgeted every year off a static average of the prior year's cost of capital. They came to BlueGamma searching for EURIBOR forecasts: forward curves at 1, 3, 6 and 12 months for the annual plan and for pricing acquisition offers, via the Excel add-in first and the API into the ERP as the group digitalises.
"Every year we have to make plans and we have to make assumptions on… what the [EURIBOR] is going to be the following years. The problem is we use a static forecast which limits our ability to provide good forecasts."
Corporate finance team, Portuguese transport group (evaluation call, April 2026)"We don't have a manual approach. That's the problem. … When we make the financial plan for next year or the following years, we just use an average of the median cost of capital the previous year."
Same team — on why the budget assumption had to change"A lot of people say, what's an economist forecast? Well… they get it wrong half the time. This is the forward implied rate as at this date based on market data — has a lot more power to it."
Treasury at an international energy group, on why the curve beats a house view"If you've got £2 billion of debt, that impacts your earnings, whereas actually fundamentally nothing in the business has changed… a 15 bips movement in SONIA muddies the water of saying what's changed from iteration to iteration."
Director at a boutique investment bank — quarterly model updates for listed real-asset funds"I do debt service forecasting for any of the facilities where we have floating rate exposure… my issue with [the terminal] is it's only annually. I like this option to just pull the forward curve monthly or quarterly going out. So don't get rid of that feature."
Debt capital markets lead at a real estate investment firm"[We're] kind of just painting everyone with the same brush at the moment and then later on, we're gonna get into the specifics."
Finance analyst at a fast-growing solar financing platform — one flat cost-of-funds assumption across 5-to-25-year deals, where an upward-sloping curve prices them very differentlyThe stakes scale with the debt: a 1 basis point move on a billion of debt over 10 years can carry an NPV impact of over a million.
FAQs
Use the forward curve for your debt's benchmark (EURIBOR, SONIA, SOFR) rather than last year's average. The forward curve is the market's traded expectation of where the benchmark fixes month by month, so your budget picks up the rate rises and cuts the market has already priced in — instead of assuming next year looks like last year, or letting your system pull today's spot rate and use it forever.
For each interest period, project the benchmark fixing from the forward curve (matching the loan's reset tenor — 1M, 3M, 6M or 12M), add your margin, and apply it to the outstanding notional for that period. Pull the curve at monthly or quarterly steps so every reset date gets its own projected fixing — three months out, six months, one year, eighteen months. BlueGamma delivers the forward curve into Excel via an add-in formula that refreshes daily, or programmatically via API.
BlueGamma provides EURIBOR forward curves for the 1-month, 3-month, 6-month and 12-month tenors, built from live interbank swap rates — downloadable in the web app, via the Excel add-in, or through the API, all licensed for commercial use. Free central bank pages (ECB, Bank of England) publish historical fixings, not forward curves, and free chart sites often lock the download entirely, leaving you hovering over a chart to pick off data points by hand.
SONIA forward curves are notoriously hard to source — one boutique-investment-bank director called them "almost impossible to get" outside a terminal. BlueGamma publishes the SONIA forward curve daily from live broker swap data, out for decades, downloadable from the web app, via Excel add-in formulas, or through the API — licensed for commercial use.
No — and it doesn't claim to be. The forward curve is the market's current traded consensus, not a guarantee; realised fixings will differ from it. It's still the standard budgeting input because it's objective, updates daily, and reflects priced-in central bank moves — as one treasury lead put it, economist forecasts "get it wrong half the time", while the forward implied rate is grounded in traded market data. Pair it with sensitivity scenarios (±50bp, ±100bp) to size a rate buffer.
Yes. BlueGamma's Excel add-in (installed from the Microsoft App Store) exposes formulas that pull the forward rate for a given index, tenor and date directly into your budget model and refresh daily — no terminal, no manual re-keying, at a fraction of the roughly $2–3k a month a premium terminal seat costs.
Yes — and it matters for debt service forecasting. Standard terminal forward-curve screens output annual tenors (1Y, 2Y, 3Y…), which don't line up with a loan that pays monthly or quarterly. BlueGamma lets you pull the curve at monthly or quarterly steps so every reset date gets its own projected fixing, matched to the payment frequency of the facility.
Potentially meaningful money. Each reset tenor has its own forward curve, and they diverge — on one recent day the 5-year forward rate was 2.57% on a 1-month basis versus 2.75% on a 6-month basis, nearly 10 basis points apart. Check your facility agreement for the actual reset tenor and forecast off that specific curve.
They're a start, but they typically stop at around two years — useless for a five- or ten-year plan — arrive on the bank's schedule rather than yours, and come from the counterparty to your own financing. BlueGamma's forward curves run out for decades (one finance lead's first reaction was surprise at seeing projections past 2050), refresh daily, and are yours to pull whenever the model needs updating.
Yes. BlueGamma's JSON API has a forward-curve endpoint you can call daily, store in your own database, and connect to your ERP, treasury system or lending platform — replacing the two-person "one sources and inputs, the other checks and approves" routine some finance teams still run every morning. A common path is to start with the Excel add-in for the budget round (or a CSV upload to the ERP), then switch the connector to the API once the process is proven.
Put next year's budget on the curve
Pull the EURIBOR, SONIA or SOFR forward curve into your model this afternoon — and never roll last year's average forward again.
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