Dun & Bradstreet
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| Public | |
| Traded as | : DNB S&P 500 Component |
| Industry | Business services |
| Founded | New York City, New York 1841 |
| Headquarters | Short Hills, New Jersey, U.S. |
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Key people
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Robert Carrigan, Chairman & CEO |
| Products | Business information, information technology, services, research, software |
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| Total assets |
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| Total equity |
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Number of employees
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4,600 (2012) |
| Website | www.dnb.com |
US$ 1,655.2 million (2013) 
US$ 437.1 million (2013) Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. (: DNB) is an American business services company headquartered in Short Hills, a community in Millburn, New Jersey, US that provides commercial data to businesses on credit history, business-to-business sales and marketing, counterparty risk exposure, supply chain management, lead scoring and social identity matching. Often referred to as D&B, the company’s database contains information on more than 235 million companies across 200 countries worldwide. Dun & Bradstreet has been listed on the Fortune 500 and was one of the first companies to be publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
Dun & Bradstreet traces its history back to July 20, 1841, with the formation of The Mercantile Agency in New York City by Lewis Tappan, later called R.G. Dun & Company. Recognizing the need for a centralized credit reporting system, Tappan formed the company to create a network of correspondents who would provide reliable, objective credit information to subscribers. As an advocate for civil rights, Tappan used his abolitionist connections to expand and update the company’s credit information. In spite of accusations for invading personal privacy, by 1844 the Mercantile Agency had over 280 clients. The agency continued to expand allowing offices to open in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. By 1849, Tappan retired, allowing Benjamin Douglass to take over the booming business.
In 1859, Douglass transferred the company over to Robert Graham Dun, who immediately changed the firm’s name to R.G. Dun & Company. Over the next 40 years, Graham Dun continued to expand the business across international boundaries.
In 1933, Dun merged with competitor, John M. Bradstreet to form today's Dun & Bradstreet. The merger was engineered by Dun's CEO Arthur Whiteside. Whiteside's successor, J. Wilson Newman, worked to increase Dun's range of products and services and expanded dramatically during the 1960s by engineering ways to apply new technologies to evolving operations. The Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) was invented in 1962. In 1996 the company tri-vested creating three entities D&B Companies, Nielsen and the Cognizant Corporation. Cognizant Corporation included Nielsen TV Ratings, Gartner Group, Clarke-O'Neill, Erisco and several other lesser known entities. In 1999 Cognizant Corporation spun off Nielsen TV Ratings and shortly thereafter divested all its holdings emerging as IMS Health. IMS Health continued to hold its prize incubator company that is today known as Cognizant Corporation. ACNielsen (1996),Cognizant Technology Solutions (1996), and Moody's (1999)
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