An effective benchmarking regime is critical in evaluating a firm's performance in the marketplace, and this is no less true of operational risk performance than of profitability or production efficiency. RiskBusiness offers a flexible, innovative benchmarking service by which firms can engage in customised benchmarking exercises across a range of variables. The RiskBusiness Benchmarking Service allows a firm to compare a stream of internal performance information against data acquired from other RiskBusiness clients and subscribers, centrally processed on an anonymous basis to provide useful feedback to the participant community.

The opportunities for customised benchmarking programmes are wide-ranging, from e-fraud levels on credit cards to performance levels on standard operational risk criteria, such as loss event frequency. Each participant will act both as a provider and as a beneficiary of the benchmarking data in each category involved.

Existing data libraries for external benchmarking are, in the main, derived from publicly disclosed sources, and thus lack the focus and direct applicability of a private, participatory programme. Nor is application of this technique limited to the financial services industry. On the contrary, RiskBusiness' innovative benchmarking platform can be leveraged for virtually any set of tracking variables.

The "base comparison" option would be KRI benchmarking, in which firms that collect particular KRIs (as included in the KRI Library) contribute values for selected metrics and receive peer group benchmarks in return.

Other potential benchmarking targets include capital (regulatory, economic and/or ICAAP), performance measures, satisfaction levels, scenario frequency/severity estimates and competition levels. In each of these cases, the resultant metrics are considered as "KRIs" and the clients can use the KRI Benchmarking Service.

Key Features of KRI Benchmarking:

• Secure and confidential data submission, supported by automated data quality checks and data anonymisation;
• Automated calculation of data pool benchmarks;
• On-demand reporting and inquiry facility available to participating firms;
• Historical trend analysis.

For more information on the KRI Benchmarking Service, please click [here], or email us on info@riskbusiness.com.