Today Equifax is said to hold information on 800 million individuals around the world, with revenues of $3.1 billion last year.Ĭorelogic primarily provides services for the mortgage and real estate industries.
In the 1970s, the company was criticized based on a perception that it was selling data on personal behavior such as sexual orientation, playing along with a theory that such characteristics could predict the likelihood of people repaying their loans. Credit references were its core business from the beginning, as well as providing data to insurance companies to assess risk and set premiums.
The company landed itself in hot water with the US federal trade commission over the way this service was marketed – through offering a free trial which automatically (and with an insufficient warning, it was alleged) rolled over into a paid subscription.Įquifax is the oldest company covered here, established in Georgia, US in 1899. This was a shrewd (some might say cynical!) move as it capitalized on growing public awareness of corporate data-gathering which had begun to make news headlines around the time. It also began selling directly to consumers – by offering insights into their own credit worthiness based on data gathered by Experian and bought in from third parties. The group combined credit scoring with the database and marketing expertise it had built over the years to begin offering its services across multiple industries, initially financial and then expanding into all sectors. You can see an interesting graphical history of the company here.Įxperian, as it is now known, started when a US credit reference agency of the same name was acquired in 1996 by UK direct marketing specialists GUS, which had carried out mail order sales using catalogs since 1900. Last year it announced plans to make its retail database – known as Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) – publicly available (for a cost) on a large scale, to allow other businesses to build applications based on the data. It also pioneered audience measurement techniques for TV, music, radio and magazine audiences which have become industry standard. As well as US consumer behavior, which it measures through its National Consumer Program, it is active in gathering data on consumers in over 100 other countries. Nielsen has been around since 1923 and has established itself as a leader in market research and ratings.
It has responded to this in recent years by offering a global “opt-out” and giving consumers some visibility about what information on them is held, through the website. The company has been criticized in particular for reports that people have found it difficult to prevent Acxiom from using their data, or to remove their data from Acxiom’s systems. Today they claim to hold data on “all but a small percentage” of US households, and their data is said to be used to make 12% of the nation’s direct marketing sales. Thanks to partnerships with banks and retailers beginning in the early 80s it became a world leader in direct marketing, and marketing data-broking. Described as “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”, it pioneered the business model of collecting data on people, segmenting them and selling it to other businesses to use in their marketing. Acxiom started life as demographics, as a side-project by Charles Ward to collect data for use in local politics.