Creditsafe Brand Guidelines: An Oslo Start of 1997, a Welsh Base & GraydonCreditsafe

Credit reports sold by phone and sent over the internet.

Creditsafe began in Oslo, Norway, in 1997. English Wikipedia describes the idea as using what was then a new technology, the internet, to supply business information to small and medium-sized businesses: the company sold its service over the telephone and delivered the reports online. The company’s own history page tells the same story, saying the plan was to give smaller firms instant access to company credit reports.

Expansion followed quickly. According to English Wikipedia, Creditsafe opened an office in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1998 and came to the United Kingdom in 2000. In 2002 it moved its UK sales operation from London to Caerphilly in South Wales, and in 2006 it set up a shared service centre in Cardiff Bay that grew to support sales teams in other countries. Further offices opened in Roubaix, near Lille, in 2006, Dublin in 2007, The Hague in 2008, Berlin in 2010, Brussels in 2011 and Turin in 2013.

The company left Europe in 2012, when it founded Creditsafe United States in Allentown, Pennsylvania, later adding an office in Tempe, Arizona. In September 2016 it set up its own operation in Japan, with offices in Fukuoka and Tokyo, English Wikipedia says. The encyclopaedia describes the group as privately owned.

Norwegian Wikipedia adds that the group was founded in Oslo but now has its head office in Cardiff, and that the Norwegian business still runs from Oslo as the group’s local unit.

Company reports, scores and limits.

Creditsafe describes itself as a business-intelligence company that specialises in business credit checking. Its core product is the company credit report, which the company says combines a credit score and a suggested credit limit with financial and director information, and is written so that people without a finance background can read it. A director search is included as standard in its business reports, the company says.

The range has grown around that report. Creditsafe’s website groups its services into credit and risk (company and international credit checks, a consumer credit check, company monitoring, bank-account verification and debt recovery), compliance (anti-money-laundering checks, politically exposed person and sanctions screening and identity checks), and sales and marketing data, sold as business lists. It also offers an API and apps that connect its data to accounting and customer-relationship software.

Scale is given on the company’s own terms. Its website says it holds information on more than 430 million businesses, offers reports on companies in more than 200 countries, and has 26 offices across 16 countries with more than 1,000 staff. Those are Creditsafe’s figures, and the encyclopaedia entries repeat them as company claims.

The company also publishes its own data. In Norway, Norwegian Wikipedia says, Creditsafe regularly issues bankruptcy statistics and analysis based on records from the Brønnøysund Register Centre and other public sources, and these reports are often quoted in Norwegian media. Credit-information work in Norway is regulated under the personal-data law and supervised by the Norwegian data authority, Datatilsynet, the same entry notes.

Creditsafe lists four values on its website: being customer obsessed, trustworthiness, being different and respect.

Credit bureaus and business information.

Credit bureaus and business-information firms sell something nobody can see: records of who borrowed, who repaid and which companies are still trading. Their brands lean on a small set of visual signals to make that work visible. Look for wordmarks in blue, green or purple, and for data shown the way the companies publish it: dashboards, trend charts and the curved score gauge that places a number on a scale.

Most of these firms speak to two audiences at once. One set of pages is for consumers checking their own credit report or score, with sign-up steps and explanations of what moves a number up or down. Another is for lenders and businesses checking a customer or a supplier, with language about risk, onboarding and decisions. The same brand has to read as approachable to an individual and as technical to a bank.

Regulation shapes these identities as much as design does. Credit information companies work under central banks and data-privacy regulators, so their sites carry pages on how personal data is used, how to correct a record and how to raise a dispute. Their histories include licences, regulatory decisions and court rulings, and this guide states those events with their dates and outcomes, as the cited sources give them.

The firms also publish themselves through annual reports, research notes on lending trends and anniversary campaigns. For each company, this guide covers where it began, who owns it now and how it describes its own services, and marks the company’s own claims as such. No score, report or rating is described here as accurate or fair.

Graydon, Luxembourg and a new Welsh head office.

The group has grown by acquisition as well as by opening offices. On 1 March 2022 Creditsafe announced that its Dutch company, Creditsafe Nederland, was buying Graydon from the credit insurer Atradius, which had owned it outright for the previous five years. Graydon, a business-information provider in the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK, had been operating for more than 130 years, the announcement said; Cato Syversen, Creditsafe’s chief executive, said the deal would help the group grow in those markets.

The combined business took a shared name in the Low Countries. In January 2024 the Belgian business news service dVO reported that GraydonCreditsafe Group, based in Antwerp, was taking over the whole business-information division of Editus Luxembourg, with a database covering more than a million companies in Luxembourg and the wider Benelux; the services were to be offered under the name GraydonCreditsafe Luxembourg.

Wales has remained the centre of the UK business. In March 2025 WalesOnline reported that Creditsafe had completed the move of 300 staff from Caerphilly to a new head office in the Ty Meridian building at Cardiff Gate Business Park, and planned to create a further 300 jobs there over five years. The paper said the company also had offices in Cardiff Bay, Dublin and London and more than 40,000 customers in the UK. Chris Robertson, chief executive of Creditsafe UK and Ireland, called the move from London to Wales more than two decades earlier “a pivotal moment” for the company. WalesOnline added that Creditsafe had previously been named among the Sunday Times Top 100 companies to work for in the UK.

The brand itself speaks in plain, sales-led language: free trials, phone numbers in the header and simple product names such as Check & Decide for automated credit decisions.

For a design guide, Creditsafe shows how a business-information brand can be built around one document, the company credit report, and then stretched across compliance, marketing data and software links. Compare Dun & Bradstreet, the older name in business credit, and Experian. For this guide we use navy, teal and amber with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Creditsafe’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.