Advisen, the provider of online commercial insurance program benchmarking, has released Advisen version 8.0 with new and enhanced benchmarking tools built on top of data covering more than 375,000 businesses. Advisen 8.0 allows users to determine how price varies by insurance company and across custom peer groups as well as distinguish by layer in each program.

Advisen starts with 1.5 million programs and then overlays more exposures values, such as an insured's financial health, regulatory violations, and litigation. Having created the most relevant peer group, users normalize their benchmarked program data with these unique exposure values to control for unique company attributes. Advisen 8.0 also easily allows benchmarking by SIC code so you can see data for just roofers or eating places.

Advisen 8.0 builds upon the embedded value of Advisen's Total Cost of Risk and Exposure Benchmarking tools to bring transparency into the marketplace, enabling market participants to make program structure decisions. Any risk manager, underwriter, or broker can assess how one market compares with several others by price or rate online. "That changes the competitive pricing landscape and helps match the right market with the right risk," says Jim Blinn, Advisen principal and director of Advisen Analytics. "If you could easily determine the different markets' approach to pricing for the same coverage and class of business, would that change your decision-making? We think the answer is absolutely yes, and we'll be eager to see how different insurance companies use this new perspective competitively in the current soft market."