Experian has only been around since 1980 as a data collection company founded by John Peace in Nottingham, England as CCN systems, an information services business owned by GUS plc. The company was formed to collect information on people, businesses, motor vehicles and insurance. It also collects ‘lifestyle’ data from on- and off-line surveys. It was demerged from GUS in 2006 and begun trading on the London stock market.

Experian is most widely known for its credit reporting services, which it acquired from TRW in 1996. In my opinion, TRW has a much more interesting background than Experian.

From Wikipedia on TRW: The remotest origin of the company was in the Cleveland Cap Screw Company, founded in 1901, which eventually became Thompson Products. The 1958 merger of Thompson with the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation (named after Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge) was named Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc., then shortened to TRW Inc. in 1965. In 1977 ESL Inc. was merged into TRW, expanding the firm’s high technology data communications capability.

TRW Inc. was active in the early development of missile systems and spacecraft, most notably the NASA deep space satellites Pioneer 10 and 11 which sent information back to Earth for 30 years and continue to travel to the stars. TRW Inc. also pioneered systems engineering. Other engineering feats included being one of the first companies to build automobile safety air bags in the 1980s.

Experian currently sells credit reports on line through freecreditreports.com, provides credit score comparisons at nationalscoreindex.com (free of charge). In 2006, Experian entered the Canadian credit report market through the purchase of Northern Credit Bureaus in Sept 2006.

Other personal information databases:

• Owns Cheetah Mail, and an e-mail marketing company providing e-mail marketing software and services was acquired in 2004
• Collects postal data through QAS to verify and clean name and address records.
• In December 2005 Experian acquired FootFall Ltd, an information provider to the retail and retail property industries.
• In April 2007, Experian acquired Hitwise, an internet monitor that collects data directly from information service provider networks.

We will be covering the history of Equifax and TransUnion in our next blog posts. Stay tuned!

Do you know any other tidbits about Experian? Leave a Comment!

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