In the world of Corporate Linkage I often hear, “linkage is never finished”.  What do I mean by this statement?  Change is constant in today’s business environment.  Some businesses are starting up while others are closing their doors.  Businesses are acquired and businesses merge.  That is why at Experian we constantly monitor for changes in Corporate Hierarchies that may impact your business. 

Do you do business with Microsoft or Skype?  If you do, you may be interested to know Microsoft announced on October 13^th their acquisition of Skype was complete.  At Experian we started monitoring for this event back in May when Microsoft announced their intention to acquire Skype.  We didn’t make changes to our database upon an announcement.  We waited until the regulators and shareholders approved the acquisition and for the legal ownership change to occur.  This change in ownership is our trigger to update the database and make this information available to you – real time!

The ability to actively monitor for business changes and make real-time database updates is just one of the unique advantages of Experian’s Corporate Linkage offering.  How do we do this?  Well there’s definitely a bit of magic that comes from our technology, but there’s a human touch as well.  Sitting just a few desks over from where I sit is our team of talented Linkage Analysts; the human touch to Experian’s linkage offering. If you have not checked out Experian’s Corporate Linkage recently, you can learn more here.

In my previous post, I talked about how the technology environment enables our Corporate Linkage solution, and promised to describe how the “linkage recipe” works – so here we go.

Let’s start with what is eligible for linkage and why.  Since our customers are looking for data that helps them assess risk and accountability for the obligations of the business, Experian links entities that have legal and financial responsibility as is the industry accepted norm.

We have set up relationships with select sources that provide subsidiary/parent and headquarter/branch relationships on the publicly-held and the largest privately-held companies in the U.S., including multi-national companies with offshore locations.  These sources give us superior coverage on the most visible and dynamic businesses.

Also, our vast data warehouse and corresponding rules engine allows us to perform automated data mining against a wide array of public record data (like Corporate Registrations and Fictitious Business Name filings) and other credit data.  These processes highlight linkage relationships, generally on small and mid-sized businesses that would otherwise be too obscure to identify manually.   We take this data mining one step further by using strict business rules to identify candidates that expand the linkage on the largest corporate families.

The final component of our linkage process is a dedicated linkage maintenance team, based in Costa Mesa, CA, equipped with powerful maintenance tools designed specifically for corporate linkage.  This team monitors and updates the top corporate families, monitors Merger and Acquisition (M&A) activity and makes real-time linkage updates as changes occur.  These processes ensure we have the freshest most accurate view of a corporate family. 

This team utilizes an assortment of news feeds within our Corporate Linkage M&A Monitoring and Update Program.  Within this program, hundreds of triggers are received each day from best-in-class news aggregators and other sources.  Each feed is reviewed for relevance by the Experian team.  Once the research of an event is complete, the team updates our database using powerful data maintenance tools to reflect the new organizational structure.  The updated corporate linkage structure is available to our clients in real time via our suite of online products.  This ability to provide real-time updates to corporate linkage is unparalleled in the industry.  The team takes pride in the fact that over the last 90 days, 100 percent of M&A updates were completed the same day the trigger was received.

Welcome to my inaugural post on the Experian Business Credit Blog. I am often asked how the business credit information we provide to our customers is created and maintained – so this seems like a good topic to start with.

Our data model takes advantage of the strengths and uniqueness of thousands of data sources, ranging from “firmographic” data sources, to public record sources, to Accounts Receivable (A/R) files as well as some specialty data feeds.  Our commercial data repository allows for permanent storage of data from every source exactly as they gave it to us.

Once the data is in file we execute pre-defined rules against every record in file to get the best data element from each source promoted to the composite record that our customer’s see.  Think of it this way, we are able to take the Phone Number from “Source A” and the Industry Code from “Source B” etc.

The Business Identification Number (BIN) is one of the keys to our data aggregation model.  A BIN is assigned to each business information report and that BIN stays with that business location throughout its life cycle and is “retired” if the business ceases operations.  The BIN is also a fundamental component of our corporate hierarchy linkage which allows us to represent business to business ownership within “corporate families.”

The database environment is very dynamic and updates are made to the file throughout each day, most are available to customers in real time.  In fact, in the last 30 days there were 44.4 million updates to our file.  These updates include a mix of automated updates based on sourced data and updates made by our Costa Mesa, CA based Linkage Maintenance team resulting from scheduled reviews of corporate hierarchies and completed Merger and Acquisition (M&A) events.  In addition, our Costa Mesa, CA based Commercial Relations team will make updates based on feedback from interested parties such as customers.

The end result is a file of about 25 million business credit reports that our customers rely on to help them make key business decisions.