We will reveal secrets about business credit reporting agency.

1. Business Credit Reporting
Agency Secrets Revealed

2. Ty Crandall
Director of Business Credit Services
(877) 600-2487
ty@disputesuite.com

3. Business Credit
• Business Credit is credit that is
for a business, and is in the
Business Name
• With business credit the
Business builds its own credit
profile and credit score
• With an established credit
profile and score, the business
will then qualify for credit

4. Business Credit Reporting Agencies
• There are three major companies that collect
business information and publish it
• These are Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, and
Business Equifax
• D&B is by far the largest, but the other two
are catching up quickly

5. Business Credit Reporting Agencies
• There are a few other business credit reporting
companies other than Experian, D&B, and
Equifax, but they’re not big players and a
business owner won’t need to worry too much
about them
• These include PayNet,
FDInsight, BusinessCreditUSA,
and ClientChecker

6. Business Credit Reporting Agencies
• Dun & Bradstreet is the most common, and is
used by most vendors to extend lines of credit
• Landlords use them to approve office leases
as well
• Experian is used by many credit card
companies and non-traditional business
lenders

7. Business Credit Reporting Agencies
• Equifax is called the “Small Business Financial
Exchange” and is the most important for cash
lenders such as banks
• To concentrate on one and not the others is to
have lopsided credibility
• A business needs to build business credit with
all three of these major credit reporting
agencies to achieve genuine credibility

8. Equifax
• Equifax is the oldest and largest credit bureau in
existence today. They were originally founded in
1898, 70 years before the creation of TransUnion
• Two brothers, Cator and Guy
Woolford, created the company.
Cator actually got the idea from his
grocery business, where he
collected customers’ names and
evidence of credit worthiness
• He then sold that list to other
merchants to offset his own
business costs

9. Equifax
• The success of this tactic led Cator and his
attorney brother, Guy, to Atlanta, where they
set up what would become one of the most
powerful industries in existence today
• The Retail Credit Company was born, and local
grocers quickly started using the Woolford
service, which expanded rapidly. By the early
1900s the service had expanded from grocers
to the insurance industry

10. Equifax
• Retail Credit Company continued to grow into
one of the largest credit bureaus, by the 1960s
having nearly 300 branches in operation
• They collected all kinds of consumer data,
even rumors about people’s marital lives and
childhoods. They were also scrutinized for
selling this data to just about
anyone who would buy it

11. Equifax
• Throughout the 60s Equifax continued to provide
credit reporting services, but the majority of their
business came from making reports to insurance
companies when people applied for new
insurance policies, including life, auto, fire, and
medical insurance
• Almost all major insurance companies were using
RCC to get information on the
health, habits, morals, finances
and vehicle use of potential insurees

12. Equifax
• Equifax also provided companies with services
including investigating insurance claims and
making employment reports when people
were seeking new jobs
• Back in the 60s most of Equifax’s credit work
was actually being done by their subsidiary,
Retailers Commercial Agency

13. Equifax
• In the late 60s, Equifax started to
compile their data onto
computers, giving many more
companies access to this data – if
they chose to purchase it
• They also continued to buy up
many more of their smaller
competitors, becoming larger
and also attracting the attention
of the Federal government
• They began to earn a bad

14. Equifax
• Equifax was gathering details about people including
their marital troubles, jobs, school history childhood,
sex life, political activates, and more
• There was no limit to the kind or amount of data
they were collecting
• Some of the information was factual,
while large swathes of the rest were
completely false; some information
was literally no more than rumors
• Equifax was even said to reward
their employees for finding the most
negative information about
consumers

15. Equifax
• In response, when the US
Congress met in 1971 it enacted
the Fair Credit Reporting Act. This
new law was the first to govern
the information credit bureaus
and regulate what they were
allowed to collect and sell
• Equifax was no longer allowed to
misrepresent itself when
conducting consumer
investigations and employees
were no longer given bonuses on
the basis of the negative

16. Equifax
• Retail Credit Division was charged with
violating this law a few years later, causing
even more government restrictions to be
implemented
• Scarred with a bad reputation for violations of
the new credit laws, the company changed it
name to Equifax in 1975 to improve its image

17. Equifax
• Throughout the 1980s, Equifax, Experian and
TransUnion split up the remaining smaller credit
rating agencies between them, adding 104 of
those to Equifax’s portfolio
• Equifax aggressively grew throughout the US and
Canada, and then began growing their
commercial business division across the UK
• At this time Equifax started competing more
aggressively with rivals Dun & Bradstreet and
Experian
• They then continued to grow,
taking aligning with CSC Credit
Services and another 65
additional bureaus.

18. Equifax
• The insurance reporting aspect of Equifax’s model was
phased out
• At one stage the company also had a division selling
specialist credit information to the insurance industry,
but they spun off this service, including the
Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange (CLUE)
database, as ChoicePoint in 1997
• Choice Point formerly offered digital certification
services, which it sold to Geo Trust in September 2001

19. Equifax
• Equifax has continued to grow, now
maintaining over 401 million consumer credit
records worldwide
• They also expanded their services to direct
consumer credit monitoring in 1999. Today
Equifax is based in Atlanta, Georgia, and has
employees in 14 countries
• They are listed as a public company on the
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)
under the sign EFX

20. Equifax
• Since its inception, Equifax has operated in the
business-to-business sector, selling consumer
credit and insurance reports and related analytics
to a wide array of businesses worldwide
• Equifax reports are still commonly
used by retailers, insurance firms,
healthcare providers, utilities,
government agencies, banks, credit
unions, personal finance
companies, and other financial
institutions

21. Equifax
• Equifax provides business credit evaluations for
small businesses and corporations, allowing them
to detect early signs of trouble by monitoring key
customers, suppliers & partners
• Equifax offers a business scoring credit scoring
model known as the Equifax Small Business
Enterprise
• Equifax’s model is designed for companies that
provide goods and services to small businesses

22. Equifax
• Equifax’s source of data today is still some of
the most vital information used by credit
grantors to decide what sort of products or
services they offer to their customers and at
what terms
• Equifax’s system for collecting
data is NCTUE, an exchange of
non-credit data including
consumer payment history on
Telco and other utility account

23. Equifax
• Today Equifax is one of the major credit
reporting agencies used in many countries
• Some of the countries where Equifax is mainly
used include Canada, Chile, India, Mexico,
Peru, the United Kingdom, and the United
States

24. Equifax Business Credit Monitoring
and Alerts
• Bankruptcy Alert - any bankruptcy event reported
• Derogatory Alerts - include judgments, liens,
delinquency, charge-offs, and delinquent amounts
greater than or equal to 60 days past due reported
• New Inquiry Alert - any new inquiry made on the
bureau report.
• Equifax Score Drop Alert - any negative credit risk
score change of 20 points or more
• Unlimited Bureau Reports - for the life of the
subscription.
• $19.95 Monthly

26. Equifax Business Credit Reports
• Company Details
– Name
– Address
– Phone
– Fax
– Equifax ID
• Credit Utilization Details
– Utilized Amount
– Available Credit

27. Equifax Business Credit Reports
• Days Beyond Terms
• Inquiries
• Bureau Messages
- “Legal entity has more
than one site”
• Credit Scores
- Credit Risk Score
- Payment Index
- Business Failure Score

28. Equifax Business Credit Reports
Bureau Summary Data
– Number of accounts
– Credit active since
– Charge-offs and past due
– Most severe status in 24 months
– Highest credit extended
– current credit exposure
– Median balance
– Average open balance
– Recent new accounts and inquiries
– Recent delinquent accounts
– Recent account updates

29. Equifax Business Credit Reports
• Public Records
– BK
– Judgments
• Satisfied
– Liens
• Filed and opened
• Released
• Additional Information
– Alternate company
names
– Owner and guarantor
names
– Business comments
– Reported generated date

30. Equifax Public Records
Any business registration from the secretary
of state
–a bankruptcy filing
–a judgment
–a suit
–or lien

31. Where Does Equifax Get Its Data?
• “Equifax primarily acquires
its information from two
primary sources.
• First, all of its financial
information is obtained
through an exclusive data
sharing agreement with
the Small Business

32. Where Does Equifax Get Its Data?
A nonprofit organization made up of the largest
small business lenders in the US and consists of
information on a wide variety of credit products:
- term loans, lines of credit
- credit cards
- leases and SBA loans extended by financial
institutions (the majority of the financial
institutions are banks and equipment
leasing companies)

33. Where Does Equifax Get Its Data?
• Second, Equifax also acquires net –
30 type industry trade credit
information from a wide variety of
suppliers that provide products and
services to businesses on an invoice
basis
• Equifax combines the financial data
with the industry trade credit data
along with utility and telephone data
and public record information
(bankruptcies, judgments and federal
/ state tax liens) to create an
extremely robust, current, and

34. Where Does Equifax Get Its Data?
• Equifax–’s aggregation of SBFE tradeline performance
data with public record, firmographics, secretary of state
and other data elements have made its Commercial
database the de facto standard for doing business with
the small business market
• One of the first actions that a new small business owners
does is open a small business credit card account,
contract with a telephone provider, and engage a utility
provider for water, electricity, and gas services

35. Where Does Equifax Get Its Data?
Because of Equifax’s data gathering activities
in all these key market segments over 99% of
the businesses in the Equifax commercial
database have credit experiences (information
on account activity)

36. Who can report to Equifax?
• Equifax requires that companies within the
financial services industry have a minimum of
500 customers to report to Equifax on a
monthly basis
• Companies within other industries (non-
financial services) must have a minimum of
2,000 customers to report to Equifax on a
monthly basis

37. Equifax Credit Scores
• Credit Risk Score predicts the
likelihood of a business incurring
a 90 days severe delinquency or
charge-off over the next 12 months.
• Business Failure Score predicts the likelihood of
a business failure through either formal or
informal bankruptcy over the next 12 months.
• Payment Index provides a dollar weighted index
of a business's current and past payment
performance based on all payment experiences
in the Equifax Commercial database.

38. Small Business Credit Risk Score
• The Small Business Credit Risk Score for Financial
Services predicts the likelihood of a business incurring
greater than 90 days severe delinquency or charge-off
on financial services accounts within a 12-month period
• This score is built using financial services and trade
payment data, providing a higher degree of
predictability
• The score range is from 101 - 992 and it returns up to
four reason codes
– 0 indicates BK

39. Equifax Business Failure Score
• The Equifax Business Failure Score predicts the
likelihood of a business failure through either
formal or informal bankruptcy within a 12-
month period
• The Equifax Business Failure Risk Score is built
using financial services and trade payment
data, providing a higher degree of predictability
• The score range is from 1,000 - 1,880 and it
returns up to four reason codes
–0 indicates BK

40. Payment Index
• The payment index value is a dollar-weighted
indicator of a business's past and current
payment performance based on the total
number of financial and non-financial payment
experiences in the Equifax Commercial
database
• On the report, there is a chart shown that
provides a suggested interpretation of the
Payment Index value

41. Why Equifax Scores Drop
• Equifax's proprietary model for business credit scores
looks at many factors to derive the score, several of
which are not displayed on the summary report
• Factors include, but are not limited to
– an increased trend in delinquency
– the presence of derogatory public records on the business
profile, such as liens, judgments and bankruptcies
– an increase in the number of credit inquiries
– the number of accounts on file
– balances outstanding
– payment habits
– credit utilization
– related trends over time

42. Disputing Negative Data on Equifax
Business Reports
• Equifax provides a dispute
process to address any perceived
inaccuracies on the report
• The dispute process is not
intended to provide the business
an opportunity to dispute and
request the removal of accurate
historical information (positive or
negative) about the business.
• Only that information contained

43. Disputing Negative Data on Equifax
Business Reports
• You have the opportunity to
provide a statement of
explanation that can be added as a
comment to the report
• The comment may be reviewed
and/or used by recipients of a
business report to help
understand your business' past
history
• Equifax may require supporting

44. Disputing Negative Data on Equifax
Business Reports
• You must have credit monitoring with Equifax to
file a dispute
• Disputes are filed in the Members Center by
clicking Contact Us
• A Research Request Form must be completed
• Once the research form is complete,
Equifax sends it to the reporting agency to
verify
• Changes can take 45-60 days

45. Reports for Other Companies
• $49.95 for one report or $399.95 for 5 reports
• Bureau Summary - summary of financial and non-
financial accounts
• Public Records - any Secretary of State business
registration, judgments, liens, or charge-offs
reported
• Two Scores - Equifax Credit Risk Score and Equifax
Business Failure Score
• Payment Trend and Payment Index - a 12 month
payment trend and comparison to industry norm

46. Equifax Marketing Services
• Equifax Decision 360
• Helps determine which consumers are better
candidates for credit
• Provides a complete assessment of consumer
payment history, individual and
household income/assets and
debt levels
• Helps you to know which
customers are actively
in-the-market and can more
likely afford your products and services

47. Equifax Decision 360
• Credit information
• Income/employment verification
• Asset/property data
• Telco/utility payments
• Credit capacity scores
• Demographics
• Macroeconomic trending
• Custom modeling/analytics of
your own account data

48. Other Equifax Services
• EFX Link- search customer
database for business owners
• B2B Marketing Lists-business
data and analytics
• Customer Data Management-
keep it up-to-date
• New Business Hotlist- access a
weekly list of up to 40k new
businesses

49. Other Equifax Services
• Risk Filter- identify and rule out high-risk
customers
• Business Principal Reports- get report info on
the business owner
• Supplier Evaluation Products- evaluate risk for
suppliers

50. Getting Started Today by
visiting
www.BusinessCreditExpert.com
Ty Crandall
877-600-2487
ty@disputesuite.com