Company Overview

Equifax has been digging up the financial dirt on people since 1899. It is now the largest consumer credit reporter in the United States, providing consumer and commercial credit information, transaction processing, and information-based products and services. Equifax maintains credit profiles on 400 million consumers and businesses worldwide. The company also provides services in credit card processing and fraud detection, and sells software packages to assist companies with decision making, database marketing, data mining, and cross-selling through product affinities. In recent years it has increasingly marketed its products to consumers as a means of protecting against identity theft. The company has been expanding aggressively into foreign markets, particularly Latin America. In 2001 it purchased Clearing de Informes of Montevideo, Uruguay. The company also spun off its credit-card processing and check-management unit, Certegy, to shareholders, and sold its city directory business to InfoUSA. Equifax has also continued to expand its marketing capacities, most recently through the 2005 acquisition of BeNow, the provider of services to multi-channel marketers.