The Benchmarking Portal's rapidly growing database contains information on nearly 90,000 policies covering $US50 billion in premium placements, $US4 trillion in limits, and $US15.5 trillion in insured value. The database covers the United States; Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA); Latin America; and Asia-Pacific regions. Since its integration with Marsh's electronic data capture systems, the database has grown by more than 2,000 placements per month in the United States.

An Extensive Database for Comparing Insurance Purchasing Trends, Pricing Behavior, and Overall Performance

The Global Benchmarking Portal's extensive database includes the following:

• property insurance, including both "all-risk" and terrorism coverage;
• casualty insurance, including auto liability, general liability, workers' compensation, and umbrella/excess; and
• financial and professional insurance lines, including directors and officers (D&O) liability, fidelity, fiduciary liability, employment practices liability, and others.
• Peer analysis allows clients to compare their purchasing trends, pricing behavior, and overall performance to those of their competitors, helping them to better understand the risk solutions they need.

Marsh's integrated system allows organizations to benchmark against applicable exposure information, such as total insured value (TIV) for property or payroll for workers' compensation, among a multitude of criteria. The real-time industry report platform produces the rigorous quantitative analysis that our clients and industry specialists need to make informed decisions in a rapidly changing insurance market.

The team behind Marsh's Global Benchmarking Portal is the industry's leading data consolidator. Each policy is thoroughly checked for quality by multiple reviewers who ensure that client profile information (industry and size) is accurate and that exposure variables are appropriately applied, captured, and verified.

Benefits of Marsh's Global Benchmarking Portal

Additional benefits for users of Marsh's Global Benchmarking Portal and Benchmarking Services include:

• Policy information is available to clients for benchmarking purposes via industry reports within a matter of days. Fresh data is made available through the system within 15 days following the end of a quarter, helping to ensure the data is statistically significant.
• Benchmarks can simplify the renewal process, making it less time-consuming for clients and insurers and helping to set clear and reasonable expectations.
• Clients can be assured of data confidentiality, an issue of utmost importance at Marsh. Portal reports are always based on a minimum of 10 peer companies, ensuring clients anonymity. All Fortune reports are stripped of variables such as industry, rankings, revenues, market cap, assets, employee count, etc. Manual production of custom reports is handled exclusively by the benchmark team: sensitivity of client information always takes precedence.

Real-Time On-Demand Industry Reports

In mid-2010, Marsh unveiled an industry first — real-time, on-demand industry reports. Full integration of the Global Benchmarking Portal with Marsh's placement databases allows us to produce real-time benchmarking reports on client purchasing and pricing trends. The charts contained in the industry reports represent four analytic concepts:

• historical rate changes;
• changes in limits and retentions;
• level of limits and retentions bought; and
• pricing in relation to exposure.

The portal's real-time industry reports are available to clients through their Marsh representatives.

Detailed Product-Specific Reports

Specific product line benchmark reports are the core strength of Marsh's Global Benchmarking Portal. The granularity of data displayed in the reports and the level of statistical significance is unparalleled in the industry. A client's Marsh representative can manipulate and analyse raw data based on insurance and demographic variables—and instantaneously produce a presentation-ready analysis.

Custom Reports and Analytics

Some companies do not have industry peers against which to compare. In such cases, Marsh's benchmarking experts use creative ways to analyse the data, such as breaking the organisation down into logical segments. Marsh focuses on finding other organisations that have procedures and processes that resemble the various pieces of our client's business. For example, if the company does its own shipping, the transport department could be benchmarked against a trucking company.

Marsh's benchmarking capabilities are delivered via Marsh Business Analytics^SM, which offers financial and risk management professionals a range of analytics services, including actuarial and statistical analysis, financial analysis, scenario testing, and decision modeling and optimisation.