Our Approach

• Mission
• Building Blocks
• The Cortera Platform
• Flexible Access
• Workflow

Quick Facts

• Company Profile
• Management Team
• Board of Directors
• Newsroom
• Events
• Careers
• Address & Directions

about Cortera

The Cortera Platform

The Cortera platform consists of three main components: Technology, Data, Community and Analytics.

Technology – the foundation

We manage massive amounts of very sensitive information about companies and our customers expect us to deliver it at Internet speed with Enterprise reliability. So it was imperative that we start with the most robust technology foundation possible.  While many traditional data providers are mired in mainframe and other legacy technologies, Cortera’s technology infrastructure is flexible and efficient. So while our competition struggles to react to the ever-changing world of businesses and their complex relationships, or to add new sources of information and data, Cortera is able to quickly and efficiently create new products and incorporate new data sources. Technology is at the foundation of everything we do at Cortera and it’s one of the main things that distinguishes us from traditional data vendors.

Data – the core assets

Quantity

With a reliable, flexible and efficient technology foundation in place, we were then able to add huge amounts of data on virtually every U.S. business. We compile and aggregate information from thousands of sources including credit exchanges, public records, company-published records, financial documents, manual research and the Web. Our database contains almost 30 million U.S. company locations and it is growing every day.

Quality

Cortera employs sophisticated algorithms and routines to constantly cleanse and scrub the data for duplicate records and incorrect values and then match and merge records from the thousands of sources we pull together. Liz Devine, Cortera’s Chief Information Officer has applied her expertise as the global head of Accenture’s Customer Data Management practice and built a proven, reliable “data factory” so that we can accurately and reliably process the millions of records we manage each day.

Freshness

Our data factory processes nearly 10 million data updates a month from different sources, but we don’t stop there. Sometimes even the most sophisticated computer programs need help. So to complement the technology, we have built an international data quality team that manually verifies, updates, and adds records to what we know about every U.S. business. We don’t want our data to be good; we want it to be perfect. That’s an unreachable goal in the data world but one we strive for nonetheless.

Structure

With the growth of the Internet, access to information about businesses has never been more readily available. But in order to truly leverage that information and make it actionable, business professionals need it to be structured in a way that ensures the accuracy of the information and defines the complex relationships between the companies they deal with. Cortera has developed two leading-edge assets that bring structure to the data:

• Cortera LINK™ – LINK™ is a service based on Cortera’s proprietary numbering system for business entities and their families. The LINK ID™ service allows users/customers to access organize and track data about businesses and their affiliates using a unique, persistent 9 digit number that uniquely identifies a discrete business location. Cortera’s database currently contains over 30 million unique business locations, predominantly in the United States, which can be accessed and tracked using the LINK ID service.
• Cortera TREE™ – TREE is Cortera’s company hierarchy tool, giving users insights into ownership relationships within often complex corporate structures. TREE contains tens of thousands of corporate hierarchies, hundreds of thousands of legal entities and millions of business locations attached to the TREE. We update the data every day and receive thousands of updates from multiple means including customer input, public announcements, and manual research, to name a few.

Our ability to provide accurate and fresh information together with the appropriate structure is what sets us apart from our competition on the Internet.

Community

Introducing the Cortera Credit Exchange – the Web’s first community for business credit and a fundamentally new approach to capturing the collective insight of millions of financial transactions. The Cortera Credit Exchange takes premium credit report data on tens of millions of public and private businesses and then blends it with payment experience reviews and ratings generated by their business partners. As a result, you get unprecedented transparency into a business’ financial interactions to help inform your credit decisions.

Peer reviews on websites like Amazon, Yelp, LinkedIn, and TripAdivsor have transformed the way we shop, dine, seek jobs and book our vacations. References and offline credit groups – among business’ most successful social networks – have long played a key role in determining credit viability. Cortera now brings the best of these worlds together, introducing a wisdom of the crowds guidance to managing risk, determining payment terms, and optimizing cash flow.

Analytics – making sense of it all

What separates raw information from true insight is the ability to analyze and uncover the valuable knowledge hidden in the data. Leveraging the underlying quality and structure of our data, our analytics experts and statisticians are able to create scores and intelligence tools that enable business professionals to answer mission-critical questions that affect their business:

Sales & Marketing

• Who are my best customers? What market segments should I focus on?
• Who are my best prospects? Which ones should I target now and in the future?
• What is my ‘share of wallet’ within my existing customer base?
• What other companies does this company own that might be involved in the purchase decision?
• How much does this prospect or customer spend on what I sell?
• Who are the decision makers within my customers and prospects?

Credit & Collections

• Can this company pay me? What is their financial health?
• Will this company pay me? Will they pay me on time?
• What credit limit should I set?
• Where should I focus my collections efforts to reduce DSO?
• What is the health of my overall portfolio? Where are the weak spots?
• How are my customers paying other suppliers?
• What customers should I collect on first?
• How can I improve my collections segments and strategies?

Supply Chain

• Can I trust that my critical vendors will stay in business?
• Will they be able to finance their expansion and keep pace with my growth?
• Have my vendors acquired or been acquired by other suppliers in the industry?

Researcher

• Who owns whom in the corporate hierarchy?
• What does a company do at each of its locations?
• What other companies is this company related to?
• What are my competitors up to?
• Should I invest in this company?