Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. (NYSE: DNB) is a company that provides commercial data, analytics and insights for business, headquartered in Short Hills, a community in Millburn, New Jersey, US. It offers a wide range of products, and services for risk and finance, operations and supply, and sales and marketing professionals, as well as research and insights on global business issues, serving customers in government and industries such as communications, technology, strategic financial services, and retail/telecommunications/manufacturing markets. Often referred to as D&B, the company's database contains more than 280 million business records worldwide.
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History
1800s
Dun & Bradstreet traces its history back to July 20, 1841, with the formation of The Mercantile Agency in New York City by Lewis Tappan, later called R.G. Dun & Company. Recognizing the need for a centralized credit reporting system, Tappan formed the company to create a network of correspondents who would provide reliable, objective credit information to subscribers. As an advocate for civil rights, Tappan used his abolitionist connections to expand and update the company's credit information. In spite of accusations for invading personal privacy, by 1844 the Mercantile Agency had over 280 clients. The agency continued to expand allowing offices to open in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. By 1849, Tappan retired, allowing Benjamin Douglass to take over the booming business.
In 1859, Douglass transferred the company over to Robert Graham Dun, who immediately changed the firm's name to R.G. Dun & Company. Over the next 40 years, Graham Dun continued to expand the business across international boundaries.
1900s
In 1933, Dun merged with competitor, John M. Bradstreet to form today's Dun & Bradstreet. The merger was engineered by Dun's CEO Arthur Whiteside. Whiteside's successor, J. Wilson Newman, worked to increase Dun's range of products and services and expanded dramatically during the 1960s by engineering ways to apply new technologies to evolving operations. The Dun & Bradstreet Data Universal Numbering System (D&B D-U-N-S® Number) was invented in 1963. In 1996 the company tri-vested creating three entities D&B Companies, Nielsen and the Cognizant Corporation. Cognizant Corporation included Nielsen TV Ratings, Gartner Group, Clarke-O'Neill, Erisco and several other lesser known entities. In 1999, Cognizant Corporation spun off Nielsen TV Ratings and shortly thereafter divested all its holdings emerging as IMS Health. IMS Health continued to hold its prize incubator company that is today known as Cognizant Corporation. Moody's, a credit reporting agency, was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 1962. In 1986, Dun & Bradstreet acquired the education data company Market Data Retrieval (MDR).
2000s
During 2001, Dun & Bradstreet acquired the company Harris InfoSource International, Inc, a data company. In February 2003, the company acquired Hoover's.
On February 5, 2003, Dun & Bradstreet restated prior period results to correct timing errors in the recognition of some of the revenue associated with 14 of the Company's 200+ products, after a review of its revenue recognition from 1997 through 2002. In August 2010, Dun & Bradstreet spun off and sold their credit monitoring and management business to a newly formed company, Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. In August 2010, Dun & Bradstreet divested its Self-Awareness Solutions business to Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. and entered into a data license partnership. In 2007, Dun & Bradstreet acquired AllBusiness.com and sold the company in 2012.
In October 2013, Bob Carrigan became the CEO of Dun & Bradstreet.
On January 5, 2015, Dun & Bradstreet acquired the data management firm NetProspex. In April 2015, Dun & Bradstreet acquired Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. and announced the formation of a new division, Dun & Bradstreet Emerging Business. In January 2017, Dun & Bradstreet acquired Avention, the maker of OneSource solutions.
Operations
The company generates revenue through subscription-based products, business information reports, data licensing agreements, strategic partnerships and concierge services.
The company derives revenues through two segments: Americas and non-Americas.
Americas consists of:
- United States and Canada
- (The company divested its Latin America operations in September 2016)
And non-Americas consists of:
- The United Kingdom
- Ireland
- Greater China
- India
- (The company divested operations in both the Netherlands and Belgium in November 2016, and in Australia in June 2015)
Worldwide network
Dun & Bradstreet has offices on five continents - North and South America, Australia, Asia and Europe.
Dun & Bradstreet founded the Worldwide Network in 2004 and closed partnerships with local players across the globe that excelled in data quality. Since 2004, 16 partners have joined the Worldwide Network, providing information on over 220 countries. In return for sharing their data with the network, partners get access to the global Dun & Bradstreet database so they can offer access to global data in their local markets.
Territories covered as part of Dun & Bradstreet Worldwide Network include:
Major:
- Americas: Canada, USA
- Asia Pacific: Hong Kong, China (JV), India (JV), Taiwan, Vietnam
- Europe: UK, Republic of Ireland
Minor: Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Macau, Myanmar
Partners in the network include:
- Altares (France)
- Bisnode (Sweden)
- CB Alliance (New York, US)
- CRIF (Italy; Turkey)
- D&B ANZ (Australia; New Zealand)
- Benelux (Netherlands; Belgium)
- D&B Indonesia
- D&B Israel
- D&B Philippines
- D&B SAME (South Asia; Middle East)
- D&B Singapore Malaysia
- D&B Thailand
- ICAP (Greece)
- Informa (Spain)
- Interfax (Russia)
- NICE (Korea)
- TransUnion (Chicago, US)
- TSR (Japan)
Products and services
Dun & Bradstreet offers various products and services solving for credit, risk, marketing, sales, analytics and more. Credit and risk management products include D&B Direct (a credit risk solution for modern finance organizations), DNBi Risk Management (which automates and standardizes credit rules and policies), CreditSignal (which offers free alerts to changes in D&B scores and ratings), CreditBuilder (for building and monitoring a business credit profile), Business Information Reports (detailed, one-time reports on a company), and the Small Business Financial Exchange, Inc. or SBFE (for making decisions about working with small businesses).
Marketing and sales solutions include D&B Hoovers (a sales acceleration platform), D&B Optimizer for Marketing (a cloud-based platform that optimizes data to profile opportunities and target ideal audiences) and D&B Market Insight (a data analysis and visualization tool).
Analytics and Master Data solutions include monthly economic reports on business-related economic trends, and D&B Data Exchange, which allows users to leverage data from Dun & Bradstreet and its partners, among other solutions.
The company also offers a myriad of other products and services, including D&B Direct for Supply (an API that delivers data and analytics on suppliers into existing applications), D&B Onboard (which provides a single point of access to information and tools for simpler research and decision making), Beneficial Ownership (to help identify beneficial owners and increase compliance across a global supply chain) and more.
Competition
Competitors to Dun & Bradstreet include:
- Equifax
- Experian Business Information Services
- Creditsafe Global Intelligence Experts
- Bureau van Dijk Private Company Data
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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