TransUnion

Their full name Trans Union LLC, they are one of the "big three" credit reporting agencies in the United States. Like their main competitors, Experian and Equifax, they now market their credit reports directly to consumers, in addition to their core business of providing the reports to potential creditors.

TransUnion was created in 1968 by Union Car Company as their holding company. Its credit business began with the purchase of Credit Bureau of Cook County (CBCC) in 1969. Today it operates 250 offices across the U.S. and in 24 countries worldwide. It is based in Chicago, Illinois.

TransUnion was a subsidiary of The Marmon Group until January 2004. It is now an independent, privately held company.

In 1968, the Union Tank Car Company (UTC) a Fortune 500 company, made a decision to enter the automated credit reporting industry because of its emerging “infant technology” status and the low purchase price of credit bureaus in major US cities. This price anomaly was brought about by the appearance of automated credit reporting competitors like aerospace-minded TRW (later to merge with the Chilton credit operation in Dallas and now called Experian); the nascent operations in Houston (sponsored in part by the Association of Credit Bureaus (ACB)); and traditional credit bureaus in Oregon mananged by CBI West, Inc., a subsidiary of Retail Credit, Inc. (later to be called Equifax), which produced the atmosphere of radical change in the industry and a great deal of concern about the future of the traditional paper-based industry—with good reason.

Union Tank Car had a target of opportunity to buy the Credit Bureau of Cook County (CBCC), owned and operated as a customer-owned cooperative, similar to most US Credit Bureaus. At the time, CBCC was installing a system provided by the ACB, who had developed this system at the Credit Bureau in Houston to provide a route to automation to save the local customer-owned credit bureau industry and was being installed in several cities under ACB license.

UTC brought two executives from Massachusetts: Bill Devers, formerly at Honeywell’s computer marketing operation, and Arthur Lemay, formerly the technical director at Keydata, a pioneering on-line services company which was the first company in the world to use time-sharing technology for business services.

Then Trans Union saw the early efforts of its competitors in collecting accounts receivables data by establishing a credit bureau reporting tape format. This required each company to write, test, and operate a special reporting system for updating on-line credit files. In addition, the company saw early attempts to deliver credit reports over teletype terminals using computer codes not familiar to the users, and requiring manual intervention for virtually every report. Trans Union did two things:

Firstly, Trans Union Systems made agreements with major credit grantors all over the US to accept raw copies of accounts receivables tapes with a translating engine system requiring virtually no effort on their part to provide special reporting. This translator made it possible to gain access to many tapes otherwise unavailable, and did not require programming because it used a high-level Trans Union-developed data conversion language. This volume tape input system permitted Trans Union Systems to avoid the labor-intensive function of trade checking used in manual systems which used paper documents sent out to merchants and processed by hand to update the reports in the old paper systems, and were also needed in cases when the numbers of tape-updated accounts were insufficient

See also:
• Credit Bureau
• Credit Card
• Credit Score
• Credit Risk
• Debt
• Identity theft
• Experian
• TransUnion

• Tips For Getting Your First Credit Card

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "TransUnion".