Who is Dun & Bradstreet?
Anyone interested in commercial company information will doubtless have come across Dun & Bradstreet.
Dun & Bradstreet are active in the following business areas:
- Helping companies reduce risk
- Dun and Bradstreet help companies find profitable customers and clients
- They also help companies manage vendors efficiently
With information on 75 million businesses and branches throughout the world, it is not surprising that Dun & Bradstreet are one of the world's leading providers of business information.
The information that Dun & Bradstreet provide has enabled business-to-business commerce for 160 years. Due to this, many large businesses use Dun & Bradstreet's information on companies to help make their businesses a success, verifying potential clients and trading partners online. Therefore the information provided by Dun & Bradstreet is widely known and trusted.
History of Dun and Bradstreet
Dun & Bradstreet was started by an enterprising businessman called Lewis Tappan in 1841 to help American merchants to make important financial and business decisions. He wanted to establish a network of correspondents that would provide a reliable source of credit information.
In 1933, this company merged with its rival to form Dun & Bradstreet as a way to combat the effects of the economic depression. CEO Arthur Whiteside engineered the merger, and with his first-rate diplomatic and leadership skills, he led Dun and Bradstreet out of the depression. Emphasizing "service" as opposed to "products", Whiteside led Dun & Bradstreet into the Age of Information.
Expanding rapidly through the 1960-70s, Dun & Bradstreet introduced the Data Universal Numbering System; this system is now a standard business identifier for the UN, European Commission and US Government.
The Modern Dun and Bradstreet
Undergoing a period of restructuring in the past few years, Dun & Bradstreet have spun off several companies so that they may pursue focused strategies within their own specific fields. These are:
- A.C. Nielsen spun off from Dun and Bradstreet to become a world-leading provider in marketing information within the consumer and service industries.
- Cognizant Technology Solutions - at first a division of Dun and Bradstreet Corporation, is now a provider of application outsourcing services and enterprise solutions specifically for the Fortune 500 and Blue Chip companies within Europe and US.
- R. H. Donnelley Corporation - one of the largest public publisher of yellow pages directories
- Moody's Corporation - made up of two subsidiaries - Moody's Investors Service and Moody's KMV.
What is a DUNS number?
The DUNS number (Data Universal Numbering
System) assigns a worldwide unique form of identification to companies
and discloses corporate structures. The 9-digit number code was developed
and introduced by Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) in 1962 and is the
key to over 92 million different corporate datasets saved in the D&B
database.
The DUNS number is considered to be a unique identification mark worldwide and is employed, recognized and recommended as the standard by many companies and international organizations
