D&B, Moody's, S&P: Inside the Company Information Oligopoly

On August 26, 2025, Clearlake Capital closed its take-private of Dun & Bradstreet at an enterprise value of $7.7 billion.¹ Five years earlier, the same company had IPO'd at a $9.1 billion market capitalization,² priced its shares at $22.00, and watched them trade down to the $9.15 cash-out price Clearlake eventually offered. Public markets discounted the asset by roughly 58% over the cycle. Private equity, looking at the same financials, decided it was worth taking off the public market entirely.

That asymmetry is the puzzle this article is about.

Over the same five-year window, segment revenues across the company information sector grew. Moody's Analytics — the home of Bureau van Dijk's Orbis database — expanded 8% in FY2024 to $3.3 billion, with KYC annual recurring revenue up 17%.³ S&P Market Intelligence, the segment that absorbed IHS Markit, posted $4.65 billion in 2024.⁴ Coface's Business Information unit grew 16.3% at constant FX, the only double-digit segment in an otherwise flat group.⁵ The narrative that open data, free APIs and registry interconnection would commoditize the company information business has not shown up in the revenue numbers of the firms supposedly being commoditized.

This piece is a structural read on why. It walks through three things in order: the consolidation that produced today's market, the pricing reality buyers face, and the case study that quantifies the moat.

Three super-platforms

The global business data market — vendors selling structured information about companies, ownership and risk to other companies — runs through three corporate spines. Each was assembled through acquisition over the past eight years.

Moody's acquired Bureau van Dijk from EQT in August 2017 for €3.0 billion (~$3.27 billion at the time).⁶ BvD brought Orbis, Amadeus, Zephyr and Fame — the dominant European corporate database stack. Moody's then folded in Regulatory DataCorp (RDC) for $700 million in early 2020,⁷ Cortera (North American B2B trade-credit data) in March 2021,⁸ and kompany (Vienna-based live-registry KYB) in early 2022.⁹ The four acquisitions produced a single KYC stack reported under Moody's Analytics, which closed FY2024 at $3.3 billion in revenue, up 8% year-on-year, with KYC ARR up 17% and Decision Solutions ARR around $1.5 billion, up 12%.³

S&P Global closed its merger with IHS Markit on February 28, 2022, valued at announcement at approximately $44 billion.¹⁰ The DOJ required divestitures — OPIS, Coal/Metals/Mining and PetrochemWire — sold to News Corp / Dow Jones to clear competition concerns.¹¹ Capital IQ Pro, Panjiva and the surviving private-company datasets now sit inside the Market Intelligence segment, which posted $4.65 billion in FY2024 revenue, roughly 16.8% of S&P Global's total.⁴

Dun & Bradstreet went public in July 2020, pricing its IPO at $22.00 per share and raising $1.7 billion at a $9.1 billion implied market cap.² In January 2021 it completed the acquisition of Bisnode for ~$818 million, expanding into Nordic, DACH and Central European coverage.¹² Eyeota and NetWise followed in November 2021 at a reported ~$165 million for Eyeota alone.¹³ FY2024 revenue closed at $2.38 billion, up 2.9% year-on-year.¹⁴ Then in August 2025, Clearlake Capital took the company private at an enterprise value of $7.7 billion.¹

The challengers

Outside the top three, the long tail looks competitive on a logo slide and oligopolistic on a revenue chart.

Creditsafe reported €289 million revenue in 2024, up 12% on €257 million the year prior, claiming 200+ countries of coverage and 430 million-plus business reports.¹⁵ Ownership traces to Borasco Holding S.à r.l. in Luxembourg, which holds 70.95% of the equity according to the most current public ownership references.¹⁶ Coface (listed Paris) booked €1.84 billion in group revenue in 2024 and €261.1 million in net income, up 8.6% year-on-year, with the Business Information segment growing 16.3% at constant FX — the only double-digit segment in the group.⁵ Atradius, owned 83.20% by Grupo Catalana Occidente, reported €2.5 billion in 2024 revenue, primarily through trade credit insurance with attached business information services.¹⁷ Experian's Business Information Services line is reported only at the segment level inside Experian PLC, with FY24 (year ending March 2024) B2B revenue up 9% organic.¹⁸

OpenCorporates, the most-cited "open" challenger, was incorporated in November 2010 (UK Companies House entity 07444723) and has been funded by Luminate (the Omidyar philanthropy), EU Horizon 2020 / ODINE, and the Sloan Foundation, among others.¹⁹ Its most recent Companies House filing is for the year ended 31 December 2024, filed 30 September 2025; the company files as a small entity, and turnover is not disclosed in the summary.²⁰ Coverage is approximately 140 jurisdictions per its current public materials.

The asymmetry is structural, not narrative: a single year of growth in Coface's Business Information segment (+16.3% at constant FX, on a baseline that segment-level disclosure suggests ranges into the high hundreds of millions of euros) is roughly the size of OpenCorporates' entire commercial operation.

The pricing spread

A single-seat license to S&P Capital IQ Pro costs roughly the same as eight years of OpenCorporates' Essentials API tier. That spread, more than any single deal value, is what the consolidation has produced.

OpenCorporates publishes its tier pricing directly. Essentials runs £2,250 per year (£225 per month for 500 API calls per month), Starter is £6,600 per year, and Basic — the highest published commercial tier — is £12,000 per year. Enterprise pricing is quote-only.²¹

D&B publishes Hoovers Essentials at $529 per year for 1,800 credits.²² Anything above that is enterprise quote-only; secondary pricing aggregators report ranges from $5,000 for small teams to $50,000-plus for enterprise contracts with full data and API access.

Bureau van Dijk's Orbis does not publish list prices. Procurement portals confirm institutional licensing — the UK academic Jisc framework lists Moody's Analytics Databases (BvD) as a current 2022–2025 licensable product²³ — but contract values are not exposed at search-level. Secondary aggregator estimates put a baseline around $13,000 per user per year, with academic discounts and enterprise volume tiers shifting from there. The number is published nowhere by the vendor.

S&P Capital IQ Pro is the most opaque. Public list pricing does not exist. Aggregator estimates compiled from buyer-side reports place standard seats at $18,000–$25,000 per user per year, with the range running from roughly $1,500 per user in 400-seat firms to $30,000 per user in small firms with premium modules. One-year minimums are standard; meaningful volume discounts of 50–70% require 2–3 year terms at 50-plus seats.

The spread between the cheapest and most expensive seat in this market is roughly fifty-fold, for products that on a marketing slide all describe themselves as "company information."

Why open data didn't close the gap

The arithmetic of public registries explains why incumbents kept pricing power despite a decade of open-data growth.

The open infrastructure is real and improving. The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) reported 2.93 million active LEIs at the end of Q4 2025, with a 56.7% renewal rate and 355,000-plus new LEIs issued during the year — its strongest growth on record.²⁴ EU BRIS, the Business Registers Interconnection System, exposes free public access to all EU and EEA company registries via the European e-Justice Portal.²⁵ The UK Companies House Free Company Data Product is exactly what its name suggests — a £0 monthly CSV snapshot of every live UK-registered company.²⁶ National registries across most EU member states publish basic identity data free or near-free.

The problem is what is missing from each layer.

EU BRIS exposes basic data only: company name, legal form, registered seat and registration number. There are no financials, no UBO records, no filings and no officer information. Companies House Free Data covers UK-only and includes basic registration data plus filing history; everything else requires the paid API. National UBO registers became more accessible after the 2018 Anti-Money Laundering Directive and substantially less accessible after the November 2022 Court of Justice of the European Union ruling that struck down public access. GLEIF coverage is opt-in and concentrated in regulatory-driven populations — banks, listed entities, OTC derivatives counterparties. It is not a substitute for the full universe of operating businesses.

Vendor-claimed entity counts run into the hundreds of millions. D&B claims approximately 600 million organizations in 250-plus markets in its FY2024 10-K.¹⁴ Moody's Orbis cites 500 million-plus across its current marketing materials.²⁷ Creditsafe claims 430 million-plus reports.¹⁵ GLEIF's 2.93 million active LEIs is roughly 1/170th of those figures.

What sits between the open foundation and the commercial product is a stack of work: cross-border entity matching, deduplication across registry-format inconsistencies, beneficial-ownership reconstruction, group genealogy, officer history, predictive scoring, sanctions and PEP overlay, refresh cadence, normalised financials. Each layer requires sustained engineering investment. None of it is in the open data.

The DUNS case study

The clearest quantified example of identifier-monopoly economics is U.S. federal procurement's exit from DUNS — a decade-long policy effort that ended in a contract priced at roughly six cents on the dollar of what the incumbent had charged.

For approximately four decades, U.S. federal agencies used Dun & Bradstreet's DUNS Number as the mandatory entity identifier for federal awards. Every contractor, sub-grantee and registered vendor in the System for Award Management (SAM) carried a DUNS number assigned by D&B. The identifier was proprietary; D&B billed the General Services Administration to maintain it across federal systems.

Cumulative federal D&B spend reached approximately $639 million over the decade prior to the transition, according to GSA SAMMI procurement records.²⁸ The contract scope covered entity validation, monitoring and the DUNS issuance pipeline itself. Pricing reflected the fact that no substitute existed inside the federal rulebook.

The pivot ran through Section 829 of the FY2014 NDAA, which directed GSA to evaluate alternatives, and unfolded across roughly eight years of policy work.

In 2022, GSA awarded Ernst & Young $41.75 million over up to five years to operate SAMMI — the System for Award Management Modernization Initiative — replacing the DUNS-era validation contract.²⁹ On April 4, 2022, DUNS was officially retired from federal systems and the Unique Entity Identifier (UEI) became the mandatory identifier.

Read literally: the federal government determined that the data-and-identifier service it had been buying could be reproduced for roughly six cents on the dollar once the lock-in was broken. The remaining 94 cents was the price of the network — every form, every system, every appropriations document referenced DUNS, and changing that took eight years of legislation and tens of thousands of downstream system updates.

The comparison is not exact. Ernst & Young's SAMMI scope is narrower than D&B's historical bundle; UEI is a non-proprietary alphanumeric identifier, while DUNS embedded data services. The 6.5% figure is the order of magnitude, not a like-for-like service comparison. But even adjusting generously for scope differences, the structural finding stands: identifier monopoly produced rent, and breaking it required policy action, not market competition.

This is the moat in concrete terms. It is not better data. It is the cost of switching, measured in years of legislation and downstream-system rewrites. For the rest of the company-data market, where there is no NDAA-equivalent driving substitution, the same dynamic holds — without anyone publishing the numbers.

Segment revenue trajectories

If commercial vendors were being commoditized by open data, segment-level revenue growth would be flat or declining. It isn't.

Moody's Analytics closed FY2024 at $3.3 billion in revenue, up 8% year-on-year, with KYC ARR up 17% and Decision Solutions ARR around $1.5 billion, up 12%.³ S&P Market Intelligence posted $4.65 billion in 2024 with operating margins around 19%.⁴ D&B grew 2.9% to $2.38 billion in FY2024, the year before going private.¹⁴ Coface's Business Information segment grew 16.3% at constant FX, against flat group revenue.⁵ Experian's B2B segment grew 9% organic in FY24.¹⁸

The pattern is consistent across the disclosing players: commercial company information remained a growth segment in 2024, even at firms whose group-level revenue was flat. Buyers continued paying enterprise rates for the matching, deduplication, UBO and scoring layers that open infrastructure does not provide.

What this means for buyers

For buyers of company data — financial institutions, KYB platforms, procurement teams, sanctions desks — the structural picture is roughly the opposite of what open-data optimism suggested in the early 2010s.

Three things are simultaneously true. More public registry data is available than ever before. Concentration in commercial vendors has increased, not decreased. Per-seat pricing has held or risen across the disclosing players, and segment revenues continue to grow.

The reason isn't strategic conspiracy. It is that the work commercial vendors actually do — cross-border matching, deduplication, UBO reconstruction, ownership graphs, refresh, scoring — is structurally harder than data collection. It requires sustained engineering investment that open infrastructure projects, however well-funded, have not yet matched at scale. The 2017–2025 acquisition cycle compounded that engineering moat with a network moat: every API integration, every workflow, every regulatory filing that names a DUNS number or an Orbis ID raises the cost of substitution.

Buyers face a procurement question that public data alone doesn't answer: which problems require the commercial layer, and which can be served by the open foundation? GLEIF, BRIS and national registries cover identity, basic registration and (in some jurisdictions) UBO. Commercial vendors cover everything that requires cross-border coherence at scale. The question gets sharper, not duller, as more registries open up — because as the basic layer commodifies further, the value of the layer above it concentrates.

The DUNS case suggests the substitution path is real, but slow. It took the U.S. federal government eight years and an act of Congress to reduce its identifier costs by 93.5%. Private buyers do not have that kind of leverage. What they have is the procurement question above, applied vendor by vendor, contract cycle by contract cycle.

Five years from now, the market may look different. For the moment, the take-private of Dun & Bradstreet at $7.7 billion — eight years after Moody's paid $3.3 billion for Bureau van Dijk and three years after S&P paid $44 billion for IHS Markit — is the answer the market is giving to the question of whether commercial company information was ever going to be commodified.

It wasn't.

Footnotes

1. Clearlake Capital, "Clearlake Completes Acquisition of Dun & Bradstreet," August 26, 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/clearlake-completes-acquisition-of-dun--bradstreet-302538926.html ↩ ↩²

2. Dun & Bradstreet, "Dun & Bradstreet Announces Pricing of Initial Public Offering," June 30, 2020. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dun--bradstreet-announces-pricing-of-initial-public-offering-301086428.html ↩ ↩²

3. Moody's Corporation, 2024 Annual Report and 4Q/FY2024 earnings release, February 2025. https://s203.q4cdn.com/694693571/files/doc_financials/2024/ar/2024_Annual_Report.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. S&P Global, 2024 Annual Report and 4Q/FY2024 earnings release, February 2025. https://s29.q4cdn.com/690959130/files/doc_financials/2024/ar/S-P-Global-2024-Annual-Report.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Coface SA, "2024 results: net income at €261.1m up 8.6% and proposed dividend at €1.40," February 20, 2025. https://www.coface.com/news-economy-and-insights/2024-results-net-income-at-261.1m-up-8.6-and-proposed-dividend-at-1.40 ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Moody's Corporation, "Moody's to Acquire Bureau van Dijk," May 15, 2017. https://ir.moodys.com/press-releases/news-details/2017/Moodys-to-Acquire-Bureau-van-Dijk/default.aspx ↩

7. Moody's Corporation, "Moody's Acquires RDC, a Leader in Risk and Compliance Intelligence Data and Software," January 2020. https://ir.moodys.com/press-releases/news-details/2020/Moodys-Acquires-RDC-a-Leader-in-Risk-and-Compliance-Intelligence-Data-and-Software/default.aspx ↩

8. BIIA, "Moody's completes acquisition of Cortera," March 2021. https://www.biia.com/moodys-completes-acquisition-of-cortera/ ↩

9. Moody's, "kompany product page," accessed 2026. https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/kyc/products/kompany.html ↩

10. S&P Global, "S&P Global and IHS Markit Complete Merger," February 28, 2022. https://press.spglobal.com/2022-02-28-S-P-Global-and-IHS-Markit-Complete-Merger ↩

11. U.S. Department of Justice, "Justice Department Requires Substantial Divestitures and Waiver of Non-Compete for S&P to Proceed with Its Acquisition of IHS Markit," 2022. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-substantial-divestitures-and-waiver-non-compete-sp-proceed-its ↩

12. Dun & Bradstreet, "Dun & Bradstreet Completes Acquisition of Bisnode," January 11, 2021. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20210110005078/en/Dun-Bradstreet-Completes-Acquisition-of-Bisnode-a-Leading-European-Data-Analytics-Business ↩

13. Global Legal Chronicle, "Dun & Bradstreet's $165 Million Acquisition of Eyeota," 2021. https://globallegalchronicle.com/dun-bradstreets-165-million-acquisition-of-eyeota/ ↩

14. Dun & Bradstreet, FY2024 10-K filing, SEC EDGAR, December 31, 2024. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1799208/000179920825000012/dnb-20241231.htm ↩ ↩² ↩³

15. Creditsafe, "Company Performance," 2024 results page. https://www.creditsafe.com/cs/en/governance/governance/company-performance.html ↩ ↩²

16. Tracxn, "Creditsafe profile (Borasco Holding ownership reference)." https://tracxn.com/d/companies/creditsafe ↩

17. Atradius, "Shareholder Information," accessed 2026. https://group.atradius.com/about-us/shareholder-information.html ↩

18. Experian PLC, "Experian Full Year Results FY24," May 15, 2024. https://www.experianplc.com/newsroom/press-releases/2024/experian-full-year-results-fy24 ↩ ↩²

19. OpenCorporates, "Luminate grant to accelerate OpenCorporates impact," June 4, 2020. https://blog.opencorporates.com/2020/06/04/luminate-grant-to-accelerate-opencorporates-impact/ ↩

20. UK Companies House, "OPENCORPORATES LTD (07444723) filing history," accessed 2026. https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07444723/filing-history ↩

21. OpenCorporates, "Pricing," accessed April 2026. https://opencorporates.com/pricing/ ↩

22. Dun & Bradstreet, "D&B Hoovers Essentials," product page accessed 2026. https://www.dnb.com/en-us/products/dnb-hoovers-smb.html ↩

23. Jisc Subscriptions Manager, "Moody's Analytics Databases (Bureau van Dijk) 2022–2025." https://subscriptionsmanager.jisc.ac.uk/catalogue/2873 ↩

24. GLEIF, Q4 2025 Quarterly Business Report (active LEI population, renewal rate, annual issuance). https://www.gleif.org/lei-data/global-lei-index/download-global-lei-system-business-reports/download-global-lei-system-business-report-q4-2025/q4-2025-quarterly_business_report.pdf ↩

25. European Commission, e-Justice Portal — Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS) public search. https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/e-justice/searchBris.do ↩

26. UK Companies House, "Free Company Data Product." https://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_output.html ↩

27. Moody's, "Orbis product page," accessed 2026. https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/capabilities/company-reference-data/orbis.html ↩

28. TargetGov, "GSA awards $43M contract to replace DUNS with SAMMI," 2022. https://www.targetgov.com/articles/gsa-awards-43m-contract-to-replace-duns-with-sammi/ ↩

29. FedScoop, "DUNS number replacement: Ernst & Young / GSA," 2022. https://fedscoop.com/duns-number-replacement-ernst-young-gsa/ ↩