The History of Dun & Bradstreet
Dun & Bradstreet is an international company that maintains the world's largest database of information about businesses in all fields. The company offers its customers access to reports about businesses' size, sales and credit worthiness. Dun & Bradstreet's database includes more than 140 million businesses worldwide.
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Beginnings
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A businessman named Lewis Tappan started the company that eventually would become Dun & Bradstreet on July 20, 1841. Called the Mercantile Agency and located in New York City, the business depended on workers who collected and reported credit information about businesses to the home office.
Expansion
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In 1849, Tappan handed the company over to one of his clerks, Benjamin Douglass, who expanded the business by opening offices in other cities and by hiring full-time credit reporters. Douglass banked on the improving communication and transportation networks in the United States to gather and move reliable information more quickly. Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley all worked at one point or another for the Mercantile Agency as credit reporters.
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Competition
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The same year that Douglass took over the Mercantile Agency, John M. Bradstreet established his eponymous company in Cincinnati, Ohio, in direct competition with the New York firm. The two companies competed fiercely for business for nearly 80 years.
Douglass relinquished control of the Mercantile Agency to his brother-in-law, Robert Graham Dun, in 1859. Dun renamed the business R.G. Dun & Company and set about expanding its international reach.
Merger
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In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, R.G. Dun & Company and John M. Bradstreet Company merged operations and became Dun & Bradstreet. Under the leadership of Arthur Whiteside, the CEO, the newly invigorated company survived the Depression and prospered in the succeeding decades.
Banking on Information Technology
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The burgeoning of information technology since the 1960s has proved invaluable to Dun & Bradstreet, which early on invested in computerized databases and other methods to keep its information both reliable and immediate. In 1963, the company created the D-U-N-S number, which is a nine digit identification number assigned to individual companies and used as the gateway to information about that operation. In 2000, the company committed to establishing and maintaining an authoritative presence on the World Wide Web.
D&B in the Twenty-first Century
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At present, Dun & Bradstreet continues to offer its signature credit information, but has expanded its service offerings to include small businesses, government entities and sales and marketing professionals, all on an international scale.
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