Benchmarking

Both a noun and a verb, because money is flexible that way.

A financial organization (or any other organization for that matter) runs an analysis to determine its performance, competitiveness, efficiency, products/productivity, and potential. It is, in effect, an excruciating, clinical, microscopic comparison of your firm or organization to others that are similar. So you have to have broad shoulders and thick skin before you begin a benchmark.

The benchmarking analysis leads next to an assessment (yup, a kind of test) that can determine all kinds of things: whether to grow, whether to invest, whether to sell, whether to relocate, whether to diversify.

The term benchmark is often used in relation to government-issued Treasury Bonds or T-notes. United States 10-year Treasury Bonds are sold to investors (mostly institutional, but also individual) as security against government debt. Tracked closely by banks, government agencies, and financial institutions with employees who spend way too much time in front of multiple computer monitors, the yield on the 10-year T-note is used as a direct benchmark for the setting of other interest rates, such as mortgages. And that has implications (whether you own a home or not) for almost everyone.

So mark your benches and your benchmarks for ways that obscure financial transactions (and actors) may affect your life.