illion Brand Guidelines: Dun & Bradstreet’s Old Australian Arm, Folded Into Experian

An American agency’s antipodean arm, renamed.

illion began as the Australian and New Zealand business of Dun & Bradstreet, the American credit-information company that English Wikipedia traces to the Mercantile Agency, founded in New York in 1841. According to English Wikipedia, Dun & Bradstreet divested its Australian and New Zealand operations in June 2015 to Archer Capital, a Sydney private-equity firm, and the credit bureaus were then rebranded as illion; the same article dates that rebrand to 2018 and says the debt-collection side was renamed Milton Graham on 14 June 2018.

The new name was already in use at the start of 2018. On 19 January that year Startup Daily described “Illion, formerly Dun & Bradstreet,” as a data registries and analytics business and reported that it had bought Proviso, an Adelaide fintech founded in 2013 that retrieved, analysed and categorised bank statements. The magazine tied the purchase to the arrival of open banking in Australia and New Zealand, and quoted the company’s chief executive as saying that since 2015 it had concentrated on financial data products, built in-house and through selected acquisitions of complementary businesses.

The name is written in lower case. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and later consumer guides write the name in lower case, illion, and this guide follows them; Startup Daily capitalised it in its 2018 report. The company’s legal name, as the competition regulator recorded it in 2024, was Credit Data Solutions Pty Ltd, and the business was then majority owned by funds managed and advised by Archer Capital.

Credit reports, decisioning software and identity checks.

illion worked on both sides of the credit market. In its 2024 review the ACCC described Experian and illion as each supplying consumer credit reporting services in Australia, along with related services: software for managing customer originations, which the regulator calls credit decisioning solutions; marketing services; categorisation solutions; and identity verification services. Their customers, the ACCC said, are credit providers such as lenders, utilities, telecommunications companies and loan providers, which both use the data and supply it.

The regulator’s account also explains how a bureau of this kind works. Credit providers are generally only required to share data with bureaux with which they have a credit services agreement, so the more agreements a bureau holds, the more data it can see and the more detailed its reports become. Identity checks draw on what the ACCC calls credit header data, which typically includes names, addresses and dates of birth.

The market illion worked in was small and concentrated. The ACCC found three consumer credit bureaux in Australia, with Equifax the largest, and said that most credit providers use a single bureau, most often Equifax, while larger lenders that contract with several bureaux tend to treat Experian and illion as secondary sources. In the regulator’s words, Experian and illion provided “only a weak competitive constraint” on Equifax, a result it put down to strong network effects in credit reporting.

On the consumer side, English Wikipedia records that in 2023 the credit-score app ClearScore agreed a partnership with illion in Australia, under which users of illion’s former Credit Simple service could keep checking their credit scores and reports through the ClearScore app.

Design and documentation.

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.

Announced in April 2024, merged under one name in April 2026.

The end of illion as a separate bureau came through a takeover by a rival. According to the ACCC’s public merger register, Experian Australia Credit Services announced on 4 April 2024 that it was seeking to acquire all the shares in illion under a share sale agreement with its existing shareholders. The buyer was itself a joint venture: Experian Australia held the majority, and the four major banks, ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank and Westpac, together with Latitude Financial Services and American Express Australia, held minority interests.

The ACCC began its review on 5 April 2024 and announced on 15 August 2024, after 64 review days, that it would not oppose the deal. It concluded that a merger between two of the three consumer bureaux was unlikely to lessen competition and “may actually provide a greater competitive constraint on Equifax” than if the two continued alone, because the combined business would hold more comprehensive credit data. The regulator also examined credit decisioning software and the sale of credit header data to other identity-verification suppliers, and found no substantial lessening of competition there either.

The consumer guide Finder, in an article updated on 12 October 2026, says Experian acquired illion in late 2024 and that since 1 April 2026 illion and Experian have operated as a single credit reporting body under the Experian name. It adds that Experian scores now use a new scoring model, and that some older credit enquiries and accounts appearing on Experian reports were brought over from illion. By November 2026 the illion.com.au and illion.co.nz web addresses forwarded visitors to Experian’s Australian and New Zealand sites. illion no longer trades as a separate brand.

For a design guide, illion shows how a renamed bureau can carry an old business into new hands and then fold into a buyer’s name. Compare Experian, which absorbed it, and Equifax, the largest of Australia’s consumer bureaux according to the ACCC. For this guide we use harbour ink, ledger blue and a pale slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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