Patent ID: 7904367

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 build computer programmed to periodically generate at least one data file comprising a plurality of data items, 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 trade line data and consumer data are in a same table and the merged data includes data that categorizes the data into one or more peer groups of lending institutions; and a benchmarking query application configured to communicate with the build computer to create a user input component display that comprises: a query build portion configured to receive user-entered values for parameters of a query; and an active query build portion configured to remain visible while the user builds a query and comprising hypertext links related to parameters of the query; the benchmarking query application further configured to execute queries using at least a portion of the at least one data file generated by the build computer and at least a portion of the user-entered values.