Patent ID: 8001034

Claim:
A credit portfolio benchmarking system comprising: a repository of trade data comprising a plurality of data items regarding trade lines including data for one or more loans; a repository of consumer data comprising a plurality of data items regarding consumers including one or more names, addresses, and credit scores, wherein at least some information in the consumer data is private data that is confidential to the consumers and not in the trade data and at least some information in the trade data is not in the consumer data; a computer system programmed to generate at least one data file comprising a plurality of data items of merged data, each data item including a combination of information from the trade data and the consumer data obtained by merging trade line data with associated consumer data so that the merged data includes data that categorizes the data into one or more peer sets, each peer set corresponding to one or more lending institutions; and a benchmarking query application configured to execute a user-specified query against the merged data such that the trade line data and associated consumer data is pre-merged at a time of execution of said query, said benchmark query application additionally configured to use execution results of the user-specified queries to generate a benchmark report that compares a portfolio of a lending institution to portfolios of peers of the lending institution.