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	The History of D&B

The History of D&B

Through the Industrial Age to the Information Age

A new industry is founded

The development of the Western frontier in early 19^th century America expanded the nation at a rapid rate, leaving behind a trail of opportunity for new business interests. These vast distances made it difficult for merchants to reach the country's growing communities, and providing credit to emerging businesses in this region became a precarious venture. Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) is the leading provider of business-to-business credit, marketing, purchasing, and receivables management and decision-support services worldwide. Customers rely upon D&B to provide the insight they need to build profitable, quality business relationships with their customers, suppliers, business partners - the companies they interact with every day.

To help merchants substitute facts for guesswork in their decision-making, an enterprising businessman named Lewis Tappan began, in 1841, to establish a network of correspondents that would function as a source of reliable, consistent and objective credit information. His Mercantile Agency, located in New York City, was one of the first organizations formed for the sole purpose of providing business information to customers. Tappan's agency was a revolutionary business. Prior to this, there was virtually no way to know who was reliable in the business world. With this foundation in place, the seed for what was to become Dun & Bradstreet had been sown.

Benjamin Douglass enters the business. To foster expansion, in 1849 Tappan turned the Agency over to Benjamin Douglass, a former clerk.

The 1850's were a time of improved transportation and communication. Douglass capitalized on this change by expanding his network of offices, essentially providing the Agency with both new customers and superb information.

The credit reporter -- a new profession. Shortly after he joined the agency, Benjamin Douglass began establishing local offices and hiring an increasing number of full-time employees who became experienced, skilled reporters and interpreters of credit information.

Working as a credit reporter was a respected position that provided strong training in sound business practices. Among the reporters who went on to establish names for themselves were four U.S. presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland and William McKinley.

A strong competitor. In 1849, the rival John M. Bradstreet Company was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio. Two years later, the Bradstreet organization popularized the use of credit ratings with publication of the first book of commercial ratings.

The rivalry between The John M. Bradstreet Company and Douglass's agency intensified as the United States entered the 20th century. Fundamentally, this had lasting effects on the fate of the two organizations.

In 1859, Douglass turned over the Agency to his brother-in-law, Robert Graham Dun. Under the new name, R.G. Dun & Company, Dun continued Douglass's relentless expansion. As he saw it, his role was now to organize and more firmly govern the small empire that Tappan and Douglass had built.

During the next 40 years, Dun led the Agency all over the United States and across international boundaries, carrying Lewis Tappan's vision into the next century.

A historic merger:
The Merger of the Dun and the Bradstreet Company.
As America entered the 1930's, the effects of rivalry and economic depression on both R.G. Dun and The Bradstreet Companies could no longer be ignored. In 1933, the arch competitors merged to form Dun & Bradstreet.

The union was engineered by Dun's CEO Arthur Whiteside. Whiteside, using his first-rate diplomatic skills, was able to broker a deal with the company's long-lasting and foremost competitor.

Whereas previously both companies sold 'products,' Whiteside increasingly emphasized 'service.' With great leadership, he led Dun & Bradstreet out of the depression and into the modern era, otherwise known as the Information Age.

The rapid development of computing and communications technology in the post-war era has been central to the growth of Dun & Bradstreet. During the past 50 years of D&B's history, increases in the speed and volume of cross-border communications have influenced our evolution from primarily a provider of credit reports to a leader in the international information industry.

The 1960's - 1970's: A time of explosive growth. Whiteside's successor, J. Wilson Newman, recognized that D&B needed to take risks and increase its range of products and services in order to thrive in the modern era. Overall, D&B expanded dramatically during the 1960's, by engineering ways to apply new technologies to evolving operations. In 1963, the introduction of the Data Universal Numbering System-- The D&B D-U-N-S^® Number -- used to identify businesses numerically for data-processing purposes- helped bring business information into the computer age. This unique business identification system proved so useful that today the D&B D-U-N-S Number has become a standard business identifier for the United Nations, the European Commission and the U.S. Government.

By the 1970's, D&B had established its commitment to embracing new technology. A new "Advanced Office System" (AOS) fully computerized our data-collection operations, giving them the ability to link and analyze categories of information in entirely new ways, and to deliver information to customers faster and more economically. Capabilities like these have helped propell D&B into a leadership position in the Information Age.

Just as the American West opened up seemingly limitless scope for U.S. business in the early 1800's, so has today's technology inspired further business opportunities across the globe.

We're creating a whole new generation of products and services that give customers exciting opportunities to manage business information more efficiently. And we are preserving and building upon our distinguished heritage, for the thousands of customers that continue to rely upon our traditional credit reports and marketing information services. We are constantly expanding the size and improving the quality of our global database, which now covers more than 50 million businesses worldwide. And we're working hard to continuously improve the high-quality service that is our hallmark.

We're a company poised to meet the next century. But we will always have a fundamental legacy to define us, a legacy that ties us to our past and supports us as we venture into the next millennium. This is D&B's commitment - to continue serving the business community and to provide customers with information and services that represent gateways to knowledge and success.

1. Lewis Tappan's strong belief in ethics and sound judgment extended to his personal life as well. Tappan brought the first civil rights case in U.S. history to the attention of the national abolitionist movement and was primarily responsible for raising the funds used to appeal the case to the Supreme Court. Amistad, a new Steven Spielberg film released in late '97, covers the story of Lewis Tappan and his crusade to defend the rights of slaves. An international cast is featured, including Anthony Hopkins, Nigel Hawthorne, Morgan Freeman and Matthew McConaughey.
2. As a successful businessman, Lewis Tappan supported education, charities and social reform, including the abolition of slavery. In 1834, he skillfully organized 'Anti-Slavery Week', bringing the movement serious national attention for the first time. That same year, mobs gathered before Tappan's home and burned it to the ground. In 1835, when a fire swept through the New York business district, a number of volunteers, most of them African-American, managed to save two-thirds of goods and a half million dollars in promissory notes.
3. Abraham Lincoln, one of the four U.S. Presidents who served as a business correspondent for D&B, often laced his reports with humor. Of one of them, he described a grocer in his home town of Springfield, Illinois as possessing a rat hole in his shop that 'would bear looking into.' When Lincoln was assassinated, one of the Agency's employees drew a eulogy to the president in the margin of the page which contained the report on Lincoln's law office. A cross-like tombstone with the vertical letters 'A L' and a weeping willow tree were inked in black, in a small box, the inscription: "This office had the honor of having Old Abe as a correspondent."
4. Benjamin Douglass' family members have remained associated with D&B as employees or directors ever since his retirement in 1859.
5. R.G. Dun was the first to recognize the potential of the typewriter for business use. In 1874, he ordered 100 of the machines, at $55 apiece.
6. Because of the typewriter, beautiful hand-written ledgers were gradually retired. Today, housed at the Baker Library of the Harvard University Graduate School of Business, these are still being used by scholars and economists from around the world.
7. In 1870, Dun retained as his attorney a man who in 1881 would become the 21st U.S. president, his friend and frequent salmon-fishing partner, Chester A. Arthur.
   
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