Dun & Bradstreet Brand Guidelines: The 1841 Mercantile Agency and the D-U-N-S Number

Credit reports, written by hand.

Dun & Bradstreet traces its history to 20 July 1841, when Lewis Tappan formed The Mercantile Agency in New York City, English Wikipedia says. The idea was a network of correspondents who sent credit information to subscribers; Tappan, an abolitionist, used those connections to expand and update the agency’s information, according to the same source. The company’s own website describes its start as “a single credit bureau on Pearl Street in New York City.”

Baker Library at Harvard Business School holds the firm’s early ledgers. It calls the Mercantile Agency the predecessor of Dun & Bradstreet and “the first successful commercial reporting agency in the United States.” The collection, the R. G. Dun & Company Credit Report Volumes, runs to 2,522 volumes of handwritten reports on individuals and firms in the United States, its western territories, Canada and a few other countries, from the 1840s to the 1890s. The entries record how long a business had been running, its net worth and its sources of wealth, and at times comments on the reputation of its owners, partners and successors, the library says.

The business changed hands early. English Wikipedia says Tappan retired by 1849 and Benjamin Douglass took over; in 1859 Douglass transferred the firm to Robert Graham Dun, who renamed it R. G. Dun & Company and spent the next forty years expanding it across international borders. The second half of today’s name arrived in March 1933, when R. G. Dun & Company merged with its competitor John M. Bradstreet to form Dun & Bradstreet, a merger English Wikipedia credits to Dun’s chief executive, Arthur Whiteside.

Nine digits and a long unbundling.

Under J. Wilson Newman, Whiteside’s successor, the company expanded sharply in the 1960s by applying new technology to its operations, English Wikipedia says. In 1962 it bought Moody’s, the credit-rating business, and in 1963 it devised the Data Universal Numbering System, the D-U-N-S Number. The company describes the D-U-N-S Number as “a unique nine-digit identifier used exclusively for businesses,” and its own timeline places it in what it calls the Information Age, between its early credit network and its later digital reports.

Acquisitions in the 1960s and 1970s took the group well beyond credit. English Wikipedia names among them the yellow-pages company R.H. Donnelley, Official Airline Guides, the dictionary publisher Funk & Wagnalls and Corinthian Broadcasting, all since divested. In 1986 it bought Market Data Retrieval, an education data company.

The group was then taken apart in stages. In 1996 it restructured into three companies — Dun & Bradstreet, Nielsen and Cognizant Corporation, which included the Gartner Group. On 1 July 1998 a further split created a separate company under the R.H. Donnelley name. In 2000 Dun & Bradstreet spun off the Moody’s Corporation, according to English Wikipedia, ending nearly four decades of ownership.

What remained was a commercial-data company. It bought Harris InfoSource in 2001 and Hoover’s, a business reporting service, in 2003; NetProspex followed in January 2015 and Avention, formerly OneSource, in January 2017, English Wikipedia says. In February 2003 the company restated earlier results to correct the timing of revenue recognition on 14 of its more than 200 products, after reviewing the years 1997 to 2002, according to the same source. Its products today include D&B Hoovers, Master Data and D&B Data Exchange.

Design and documentation.

Credit rating agencies and financial data firms sell judgement and information, and most of what they publish is documents. A rating action is usually announced in a short notice naming the issuer, the grade and the outlook, followed by longer research reports and the methodology documents that explain how a grade was reached. Letter scales do much of the visual work: Fitch says it introduced its AAA, AA, A, BBB scale in 1924, and French Wikipedia notes that its long-term grades are very close to those of Standard & Poor’s, with plus and minus signs for the notches in between.

Regulation shapes that paperwork. In the United States, agencies can be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations, the status that lets their ratings be used for regulatory purposes; in the European Union, the European Securities and Markets Authority supervises credit rating agencies and publishes its enforcement decisions as public notices. Disclosures, criteria and codes of conduct therefore sit beside the marketing pages on these firms’ websites.

Data products carry the brands to a wider audience. Agencies and research houses deliver ratings, research and data through subscription platforms and data feeds, and some lend their names to index families and fund ratings: Morningstar said in 2020 that it had worked with Sustainalytics since 2016 on a sustainability rating for funds and a global sustainability index family. Training arms, webinars and conferences add further outlets for the same research.

Against that volume of documents, the corporate mark is often just a name or a set of initials, repeated across reports, notices and dashboards. This guide sets out what can be checked about each firm — who founded it, who owns it and how it is regulated — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Private, public and private again.

The past decade brought repeated changes of ownership. In August 2018 Dun & Bradstreet agreed to be acquired by an investor group led by CC Capital, Cannae Holdings and Thomas H. Lee Partners; the purchase was completed on 8 February 2019, the company became privately held and its DNB ticker was retired, English Wikipedia says. It returned to the New York Stock Exchange on 1 July 2020, again trading as DNB. In January 2021 it bought Bisnode, a European data and analytics group that had long belonged to its worldwide network, and on 20 May 2021 it announced that its global headquarters would move to Jacksonville, Florida.

The second listing lasted about five years. On 24 March 2025 the company announced an agreement to be acquired by Clearlake Capital Group; stockholders approved the deal on 12 June 2025, and Clearlake completed the acquisition on 26 August 2025, according to Dun & Bradstreet’s press release of that date. The company became privately held and its stock ceased trading on the New York Stock Exchange. In September 2025, English Wikipedia says, Stephen Tulenko, a long-serving Moody’s executive, succeeded Anthony Jabbour as chief executive.

Today the company presents itself as a source of verified business identity. Its website says it holds business records for more than 650 million organisations in over 250 markets, linked in what it calls the D&B Commercial Graph, with the D-U-N-S Number as the persistent identifier behind its risk products; those are the company’s own figures. Its products are grouped by use — finance and credit, risk, growth, master data, small business and the public sector.

For a design guide, Dun & Bradstreet shows a name built from two nineteenth-century credit agencies, with a nine-digit number at its centre. Compare Moody’s, which Dun & Bradstreet owned from 1962 to 2000, and FactSet, another financial-data company. For this guide we use a ledger navy and a slate blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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