Credit Bureaus: Equifax
Equifax recently exited the insurance-services business to better concentrate on financial services, and it has acquired additional card authorization and processing operations and entered into alliances in credit bureaus reporting and target marketing. "That really puts a focus just on the financial-services part," a spokesman for Equifax says, adding that many of the company's newest products-for modeling, risk scoring, and bankruptcy predictions-have come out of its Decisions Solutions unit. "We've elected to go from a credit bureau to a multi-faceted global company," says Thomas F. Chapman, Equifax chief executive. With some 50 acquisitions in the past several years, Equifax now operates in 40 countries and derives about 25% of its revenue from outside of the U.S. At the same time, it has reorganized itself to offer risk-management products ranging from prescreening tools to collections-scoring and customer-service models.
