Benchmarking has become a standard discipline across the insurance market.
Whether assessing underwriting performance, solvency strength, complaints trends or wider operational metrics, insurers are expected to understand how they compare with competitors.
Boards already expect it. Regulators increasingly expect it. And management teams rely on it to shape strategy. But how efficient is the process in practice?
To explore this question, Insurance DataLab conducted research to understand how firms approach benchmarking, how much time it consumes, and what it costs.
Benchmarking is common – but resource-intensive
Three-quarters of insurers regularly benchmark performance against competitors. However, not one describes this as being a quick process.
On average, completing a benchmarking exercise takes two and a half weeks, with most insurers benchmarking on a quarterly basis. This equates to 10 working weeks per year spent on benchmarking activities.
In other words, almost 20% of an analyst’s time can be spent on benchmarking – that’s one day a week.
For an industry operating in a fast-moving, capital-sensitive environment, that means significant time and resource tied up in a process in which meaningful results can take weeks to produce.
Benchmarking is not just time-intensive; it requires a significant capital investment too.
Annual benchmarking and market intelligence costs on average almost £50,000 a year, with some respondents telling us they spend twice this amount.
When internal staff time is factored in, the total cost is significantly higher.
Assuming a mid-level analyst with a salary of around £60,000 per year – and nearly a fifth of their time allocated to benchmarking – this suggests an additional staff cost of £15,000 per year.
Combined with reported external spend, total benchmarking costs could exceed £65,000 annually on average for every insurer.
Comparability remains the biggest challenge
As well as taking a considerable amount of time and money, insurers also cited a number of other challenges associated with benchmarking exercises.
The biggest challenge identified was comparability, with all insurers rating data comparability as either “difficult” or “very difficult”.
This highlights a structural issue within the market.
Financial disclosures may be public, but differences in reporting formats, segment definitions, reserving approaches and presentation standards mean true like-for-like comparisons often require manual adjustment and interpretation.
So before meaningful analysis can begin, time is spent on low-value reconciliation work to align and adjust figures. This delays delivery of results and diverts skilled resource away from higher-value strategic analysis.
What could greater efficiency look like?
Insurance DataLab has been developed to address precisely these friction points by providing instant access to credible, comparable and digestible market intelligence across underwriting, solvency, claims and complaints.
Rather than spending weeks manually gathering data, reconciling reporting differences and standardising metrics, insurers can access structured, like-for-like performance insight in one place.
Access to the Insurance DataLab intelligence platform starts from £12,950 per year – representing a fraction of typical benchmarking spend. This saves weeks of costly internal resource annually while accelerating decision-making and enabling more timely board-level insight.
More importantly, it allows teams to focus on analysing rather than compiling and validating data – enabling them to add greater value to their businesses.
When comparable data is surfaced and sense-checked in one place, analysts can move beyond reconciliation work and focus on identifying performance drivers, challenging assumptions and spotting emerging trends. They can:
- Evidence customer outcomes,
- Assess capital strength against peers, and
- Flag areas of relative underperformance earlier in the cycle.
That shift enables real strategic action:
- Refining pricing and portfolio mix
- Strengthening reserving oversight
- Informing capital allocation and providing clearer
- More defensible insight to boards, investors and regulators
The benefit is not simply efficiency; it is faster, more confident decision-making in a competitive market.
In a market where speed and comparability matter, efficiency in benchmarking is not a luxury; it is a competitive advantage.
Insurance DataLab customers currently outperform the market aggregate COR by an average of six percentage points, underlining the value of disciplined, data-driven performance management.
Request a demo to explore how Insurance DataLab can help you streamline benchmarking and accelerate decision-making.