The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation

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The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation

299 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10171
U.S.A.
(212) 593-6800
Fax: (212) 593-4143

Public Company
Incorporated: 1933 as R.G. Dun-Bradstreet Corporation
Employees: 62,900
Sales: $4.82 billion
Stock Exchanges: New York London Tokyo Geneva Zürich Basel

The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation is in the information business. Among its vast array of products are the Yellow Pages, the Moody’s manuals for investors, and the Nielsen television ratings. Begun as a credit reporting service a century-and-a-half ago, Dun & Bradstreet is still a leader in that field; it is also the leading marketing and public opinion company in the world, with 25% of the worldwide market. In addition, the company supplies information-dissemination technology, commercial credit reports, analytical risk-assessment services, and small-business pension plans. It publishes business-oriented computer software.

Dun & Bradstreet traces its origin to Lewis Tappan, who left Arthur Tappan & Company, a New York silk trading firm that he ran with his elder brother, in 1841, to found a credit information bureau called the Mercantile Agency. Tappan had long been aware of the need for better credit reporting. As the U.S. republic expanded westward, traders were moving beyond the easy view of the east coast merchants and bankers who kept them supplied and capitalized. Information on the creditworthiness of these far-flung businesses was collected by individual trading houses and banks in a scattershot fashion, and Tappan saw that centralizing the process of collecting information would result in greater efficiency. Accordingly, he took out an advertisement in the New York Commercial Advertiser on July 20, 1841, and opened shop 11 days later on the corner of Hanover and Exchange streets in Manhattan.

The Mercantile Agency operated by gathering information through a network of correspondents and selling it to subscribers. The agents were attorneys, cashiers of banks, merchants, and other competent persons—anyone who might have an impartial familiarity with local merchants through business or civic affairs. Over the years, personages no less than U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, and William McKinley, and presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, would serve as agents for the company that Tappan founded.

The Mercantile Agency opened branch offices in Boston in 1843 and Philadelphia in 1845. In 1846 Benjamin Douglass, a young New York businessman with connections in the southern cotton trade, joined the firm. When Lewis Tappan retired in 1849, Douglass and Tappan’s brother Arthur ran it as partners until 1854, when the elder Tappan sold out to Douglass. Then, in 1859, Douglass sold out to Robert Graham Dun, who immediately changed the firm’s name to R.G. Dun & Company. That year the company published its first reference book of credit information, the Dun Book.

As the nation grew and commerce boomed in the decades following the Civil War, Dun had to keep up with it by establishing new branch offices. The firm expanded into the South, west to California, and north into Canada. An office in San Francisco opened in 1869. In 1891 there were 126 Dun branch offices. Robert Dun Douglass, who was Benjamin Douglass’s son and Robert Graham Dun’s nephew, became general manager of the firm in 1896. After his uncle died in 1900, the company operated as a common-law trust with Douglass in charge as executive trustee. He retired as general manager in 1909 and was succeeded by Archibald Ferguson.

R.G. Dun also began to expand overseas at about this time. The firm opened its first foreign office in London in 1857, and added five more—in Glasgow, Paris, Melbourne, Mexico City, and Hamburg—by the turn of the century. From 1901 to 1928, R.G. Dun opened 41 overseas branches, scattered across Europe, South Africa, and Latin America.

In 1931 R.G. Dun acquired National Credit Office (NCO), a credit reporting service. The firm then reorganized into a holding company called R.G. Dun Corporation, which assumed control of the assets of both NCO and the original R.G. Dun & Company. NCO president and former owner Arthur Dare Whiteside became president of the new entity.

In 1933, at the nadir of the Great Depression, R.G. Dun merged with one of its main competitors, The Bradstreet Company. Since the two companies overlapped each other in many activities and resources, an amalgamation at that time made sense. Bradstreet was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1849 by John Bradstreet, a lawyer and merchant whose ancestors included Simon Bradstreet, a colonial governor of Massachussetts, and the prominent colonial American poet Ann Bradstreet. A large file of credit information had come into John Bradstreet’s possession as he was overseeing the liquidation of an estate, and he decided to enter the same business in which Lewis Tappan had pioneered eight years earlier. In 1855 Bradstreet packed up and moved to New York, where he challenged the Mercantile Agency directly. Two years later, the firm started publishing a semiannual reference book which offered more extensive coverage than the early Dun Book.

John Bradstreet died in 1863 and was succeeded by his son Henry, who ran the firm until it incorporated in 1876 under the name The Bradstreet Company. A group headed by Charles F. Clark then ran the company until 1904, when Clark died and was succeeded by Henry Dunn. Dunn retired in 1927 and gave way to Clark’s son, Charles M. Clark. The younger Clark was still chief executive when Bradstreet merged with Dun in 1933. The new company changed its name to R.G. Dun-Bradstreet Corporation, then to Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. in 1939.

Business remained slow for Dun & Bradstreet through the 1930s and during World War II, then picked up again after the war ended. In 1942 the company acquired Credit Clearing House, a credit reporting agency that specialized in the clothing industry. In 1962 Arthur Dare Whiteside retired and was succeeded by J. Wilson Newman, who headed Dun & Bradstreet as president until 1960, and then as chairman and chief executive until 1968. Under Newman, Dun & Bradstreet embarked on a course of expansion and technological improvement. In 1958 the company began operating its own private wire network, which linked 79 of its major offices. This allowed credit information to be handled more expeditiously.

In 1961 Dun & Bradstreet acquired The Reuben H. Donnelley Corporation. Donnelley, best known for publishing the Yellow Pages telephone directories, was founded in Chicago in 1874 and also published trade magazines. The next year, Dun & Bradstreet acquired Official Airline Guides and added it to the Donnelley division. The company also acquired Moody’s Investors Service, which provided financial data for investors on publicly-owned corporations through its series of Moody’s manuals.

In 1966 Dun & Bradstreet acquired Fantus Company, which specialized in area development surveys. In 1968 it bought book publisher Thomas Y. Crowell. When Newman retired that year, he was succeeded by former University of Delaware president John Perkins, who served as chairman for one year.

In 1971 Dun & Bradstreet acquired Corinthian Broadcasting, which owned five CBS television affiliates and publisher Funk & Wagnalls. In 1973 the company changed its name to The Dun & Bradstreet Companies Inc. It had acquired some 40 businesses since J. Wilson Newman inaugurated this expansion in 1960 and had seen its annual sales rise from $81 million in 1960 to $450 million in 1973. In 1973 The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation was formed to become the parent company of Dun & Bradstreet, Inc.

In 1978 Dun & Bradstreet acquired Technical Publishing, a trade and professional magazine publisher. The next year, it acquired National CSS, an information-processing technology company. In 1983 it diversified into computer software when it acquired McCormack & Dodge, which published systems software for mainframe computers. The next year, it cut back a bit on diversification when it spun off Funk & Wagnalls and sold most of its Corinthian Broadcasting television assets to A.H. Belo. The company however, acquired Datastream, a British business information company, and the market research firm A.C. Nielsen. Nielsen, famous for its television rating service, was founded in Chicago in 1923 by Arthur C. Nielsen Sr. Dun and Bradstreet CEO Harrington Drake was a longtime friend of the Nielsen family, and the two companies had been discussing a merger off and on since 1969.

Dun & Bradstreet sold Official Airline Guides to Propwix, an affiliate of British Maxwell Communications in 1988. In 1990 it announced its intention to sell Datastream. Otherwise the company continued to acquire small businesses, mostly related to its core credit information operations. Dun & Bradstreet continues to grow. If, as the old maxim says, knowledge is power, then Dun & Bradstreet has proven that there is also money to be made in providing the information from which knowledge is formed.

Principal Subsidiaries

A.C. Nielsen Company; American Credit Indemnity Company; D&B Computing Services, Inc.; Donnelley Marketing, Inc.; Dun & Bradstreet, Inc; Dun & Bradstreet International, Ltd.; Dun & Bradstreet Plan Services, Inc.; Dun & Bradstreet Software Holdings, Inc; I.M.S. International, Inc.; Interactive Data Corporation; McCormack & Dodge Corporation; Dun-Donnelley Publishing Corporation; Moody’s Investors Service, Inc.; The Reuben H. Donnelley Corporation; Zytron Corporation.