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Dun & Bradstreet sells data and ratings about businesses—credit scores, ownership records, and risk reports—that other companies use to decide whom to trust and do business with.
Dun & Bradstreet is the company that hands out the trust scores of the business world. It maintains a massive database of companies—names, addresses, ownership, payment history, and financial health—and sells access to that data, along with reports and risk ratings, to banks, insurers, suppliers, and sales teams. When a bank wants to know whether a small manufacturer will pay its bills, or a salesperson wants to find new customers, Dun & Bradstreet is one of the first places they look.
The core of its business rests on a simple idea: before you trust a company with money or a contract, you need a fast, standardized way to judge it. Dun & Bradstreet gives each business a credit score and a report card, built from data it collects and verifies, so a lender in one country can judge a borrower in another on the same scale. That data is sold as subscriptions to large organizations, which makes revenue recurring and sticky—once a bank wires Dun & Bradstreet's scores into its lending systems, switching away is painful. The company traces its roots back to 1841, when a New York merchant named Lewis Tappan started a credit-reporting agency; the firm has been through plenty of reinvention since. It went public again in 2020 after a period under private ownership, and it runs two main units: one selling risk and financial data to banks and insurers, and another selling sales and marketing data to help companies find and qualify customers.
The business has real strengths—a century-old data set, deep ties to banks, and recurring revenue—but it is also fighting a crowd. Credit bureaus like Equifax and Experian, newer data brokers like ZoomInfo, and even free tools chip away at parts of its turf. It carries a heavy debt load from past acquisitions and buybacks, so rising interest rates hurt. Still, its core promise holds: in a world of business strangers, someone has to keep score, and Dun & Bradstreet sells the scorekeeping.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026