ChoicePoint
 |
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| Industry | Business Services |
|---|---|
| Founded | August 7, 1997 |
| Headquarters | Alpharetta, Georgia, U.S. |
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Key people
|
James Peck CEO |
| Products | "Identification and credential verification services" |
| Revenue |
 US$ 982 million (2007) |
|
Number of employees
|
5,000 (2008) |
| Website | www |
ChoicePoint (previous NYSE ticker symbol CPS) was a data aggregation company based in Alpharetta, near Atlanta, Georgia, United States, that acted as a private intelligence service to government and industry. ChoicePoint was a spinoff of Equifax's Insurance Services Group, and it was purchased in February 2008 by Reed Elsevier (parent corporation of LexisNexis) in a cash deal for $4.1 billion USD. The company was rebranded as LexisNexis Risk Solutions.
ChoicePoint combined personal data from multiple public and private databases for sale to the government and the private sector. The firm maintained more than 17 billion records of individuals and businesses, which it sold to an estimated 100,000 clients, including 7,000 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies (30 March 2005 estimates).
However, these data had not been secured sufficiently to prevent theft of data on at least one occasion (see below). The company had also been the subject of lawsuits for maintaining inaccurate data, inquiries whether it allowed political bias to influence its performance of government contracts and accused of illegally selling data of overseas citizens to the U.S. government. ChoicePoint was used to perform consumer and criminal background checks on prospective employees of the Obama administration.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions is in the business of collecting and selling the information that commercial organizations, government agencies and nonprofits use to profile individuals, businesses and assets with data and analytic products.
The company is known for selling information for insurers to assess risk and streamline the underwriting process in 99% of all U.S. auto insurance claims and more than 90% of all homeowner claims. LexisNexis C.L.U.E.® Auto, is an underwriting database for the U.S. auto insurance market and represents a 99.6% industry contribution.
ChoicePoint generated revenue of around US$1 billion in 2006, and employed around 5,500 people at nearly 60 locations in the US and UK.
The company's activities included the following (30 March 2005 estimates):
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