Dun & Bradstreet filed an S-1 to return to the public markets after being taken private by Black Knight (BKI), Thomas H. Lee Partners, Cannae, and CC Capital eighteen months ago.  Dun & Bradstreet was reorganized and recapitalized with additional debt ($2.5 billion in increased liabilities).  The bookrunners include Goldman Sachs, BofA Securities, J.P. Morgan, and Barclays.

Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE: DNB) will be offering 65.75 million shares at a price between $19 and $21.

The firm will once again be listed under the DNB ticker and will net at least $1.3 billion from the IPO.  The IPO proceeds will be used to “redeem all or a portion of our Series A Preferred Stock that we issued in connection with the Take-Private Transaction.”

Dun & Bradstreet has 135,000 global customers, including 90% of the Fortune 500 and 60% of the Global 500.  Its primary services support risk analysis (credit and supplier risk), marketing, and sales.  Over the past five years, the firm has focused on analytics, Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), Master Data Management, and Audience Solutions (e.g. programmatic, visitor intelligence).  The product line has been built both organically and via acquisition.  Earlier this year, they acquired Orb Intelligence and its AI/ML tools for collecting firmographics and digital business identities.  Last year, they acquired Lattice Engines, a leading Customer Data Platform.

This year, Dun & Bradstreet launched two new services: an ABM platform and an Analytics Studio that combines Dun & Bradstreet company intelligence with customer-owned and alternative data sources.

Dun & Bradstreet offers global services for risk analysis (credit, supplier), Master Data Management, Compliance, B2B DaaS, Prospecting, and Sales Intelligence.  Key products include DNBi, D&B Direct, D&B Credibility, D&B Hoovers, D&B Optimizer, D&B Master Data, D&B Lattice, D&B Audience Targeting, D&B Visitor Intelligence, and First Research.

The firm now focuses on “business decisioning data and analytics,” which “enables companies around the world to improve their business performance.” Dun & Bradstreet’s Data Cloud “fuels solutions and delivers insights that empower customers to accelerate revenue, lower cost, mitigate risk, and transform their businesses.”  Key data assets include the D&B WorldBase file with global company linkage; various analytical risk scores; credit and supplier risk reports; the global D-U-N-S numbering system for companies; country risk reports; industry overviews; and Hoovers company profiles.

The firm continues to invest in its global data.  Dun & Bradstreet listed the following data initiatives:

“- We have significantly increased our investment in the breadth and depth of our data.  We have specifically focused on better utilization of available data, automation of business data research, improvement of identity resolution, expansion of our individual contact database and implementation of tools to monitor and streamline our data supply chain so that we can generate better, more actionable business insights and outcomes for our clients. We are also proactively addressing data quality issues.

– Although we draw from approximately 16,000 proprietary and publicly curated sources, Dun & Bradstreet had historically focused on identifying and collecting a narrow subset of data that was appropriate for specific solutions.  We have since reoriented our approach towards better ingesting all available data to effectively leverage previously disregarded sources of data and thereby improve the consistency, accuracy and predictive power of our solutions.

– We are also expanding the volume of the data we are able to offer.  For example, we have increased D&B Hoover’s premium contact data from approximately five million e-mail contacts to approximately 16 million contacts in our Data Cloud from January 2019 through March 31, 2020, while simultaneously improving the accuracy of those contacts by 250% since the beginning of 2018.  We specifically focused on individuals we consider having significant influence over the buying process at companies that are most important to our clients based on our verified usage analysis.

– We are also expanding our coverage of SMBs and incorporating new, alternative data sets to expand the breadth of companies covered and depth of information we are able to provide clients. As part of this initiative we acquired Orb in January 2020, which allows us to better capture the digital footprint of businesses as well as the digital exhaust that businesses generate.  By incorporating additional data sets into our solutions, we can continue to expand and refine the insights we offer to our clients, which we believe will enhance our competitive advantage.

– We have implemented a data watch program (the “Data Watch Program”) to proactively monitor and repair issues before clients experience them.  Since May 2019, both client issues as well as Data Watch Program issues are now being logged in our data quality repository.  We have identified, logged and resolved a number of issues as a direct result of this initiative and are continuously working to address additional issues.”

Dun & Bradstreet S-1

Dun & Bradstreet has a set of content differentiators.  These include the global D-U-N-S Numbering system; global linkage; financial and risk data for credit, procurement, and compliance functions; First Research industry profiles; and Audience Solutions for programmatic and visitor intelligence.

“Data is only valuable when it drives action that moves an organization towards its goals,” stated the S-1.  “Underpinned by an integrated technology platform, our solutions derive data-driven insights that help clients target, grow, collect, procure, and comply.  We provide clients with both curated bulk data to incorporate into their internal workflows and end-to-end solutions that generate insights from this data through configurable analytics.”

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Continue to Part II.