Dun & Bradstreet: Overview

Overview

This profile considers Dun & Bradstreet, aka D&B.

It covers -

• introduction
• holdings
• history
• studies

Introduction

New York-based D&B is a specialist information service provider that during the second half of last century encompassed US printing, audience research and broadcasting interests.

As of 2002 its revenue was around US$1.4 billion, with approximately 9,000 employees worldwide. In 2001 it spun off the Moodys financial data service.

Its corporate site is here.

Holdings

An indication of D&B holdings is here.

History

D&B dates from 1841, with the establishment by Lewis Tappan (1788-1873) of a commercial credit service, the Mercantile Agency.

Tappan was founder of the Journal of Commerce and author of Is it Right to be Rich? He was a prominent Abolitionist, co-founding the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 (and splitting it in 1840 - when a woman was elected to the Society's board - declaring that it would be "promiscuous for a lady to sit behind closed doors with gentlemen"). In 1839 he had been prominent in the Amistad case. He went on to write The Fugitive Slave Bill: Its History & Unconstitutionality, With An Acount of The Seizure & Enslavement of James Hamlet, & His Subsequent Restoration to Liberty and sponsor The Emancipator newspaper.

The rough and ready nature of reporting was demonstrated in the landmark defamation action by John Beardsley, commenced in 1848 and lasting for 23 years, that privileged reporting agencies and in the words of critic Scott Sandage saw the US

sacrifice privacy rights in the quest to separate good credit from bad, the virtuous from the failed, the saved from the damned.

RG Dun was incorporated by his grandson in 1859: employees included Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley. Its subscribers grew from 7,000 in the 1870s to 40,000 in the 1880s. By 1900 its reports covered over a million US businesses. In 1933 Dun merged with The Bradstreet Companies (a competitor founded in 1849).

John Moody (1868-1958) established what became Moody's Investors Service - acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 1962 and spun off in 2000 - when he published Moody's Manual of Industrial & Corporation Securities. There is an account of the company in his autobiography The Long Road Home (1933) and Fast by the Road (1942).

Moody's status is reflected in Thomas Friedman's 1996 comment that

there are two superpowers in the world today in my opinion. There's the United States and there's Moody's Bond Rating Service. The United States can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody's can destroy you by downgrading your bonds. And believe me, it's not clear sometimes who's more powerful.

Dun & Bradstreet, like its competitors, acquired and shed a range of general and specialist media interests during the 1980s and 1990s.

It sold its television stations in 1984 and bought the ACNielsen audience measurement group (profiled here), founded in 1923. Nielsen was spun off in 1996.

Intercontinental Medical Statistics (IMS) was bought in 1988 and spun off as Cognizant (subsequently disassembled) in 1996. The Official Airlines Guide was sold to Maxwell in 1988 for US$750 million.

Directory printer RH Donnelley, acquired in 1961, was spun off in 1998.

Cognizant Technology Solutions was established as the group's inhouse technology development centre in 1994 and spun off as a software development and maintenance services business as part of Cognizant.

In 2001 Dun & Bradstreet rebadged itself as D&B. In 2002 it paid US$117 million for the Hoovers information service.

Studies

There has been no major independent study of Dun & Bradstreet, regrettable given its significance for the rise of the modern corporation and what has been characterised as the information economy.

For Tappan see in particular Bertram Wyatt-Brown's Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisianna State Uni Press 1997), A Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations 1839-58, Furnished by the Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and Others with The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (rpr New York: AM Kelley 1970) edited by Annie Abel and Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2005) by Scott Sandage. Dun is covered in James Norris' R G Dun & Co, 1841-1900: The Development of Credit Reporting in the Nineteenth Century (Westport: Greenwood Press 1978).

A perspective on the early days is provided by Alfred Chandler's exemplary Henry Varnum Poor, Business Editor, Analyst & Reformer (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1956) and Richard Sylla's crisp 2001 A Historical Primer on the Business of Credit Ratings (PDF). For more recent times see papers in Credit Reporting Systems & the International Economy (Cambridge: MIT Press 2003) edited by Margaret Miller, Ratings, Rating Agencies and the Global Financial System (London: Kluwer Academic 2002) by Richard Levich, Giovanni Majnoni, Carmen Reinhart & Giocanni Majnoni and The Growth of Credit Information: A History of UAPT-Infolink plc. (Oxford: Blackwell 1992) by C. McNeil Greig.