Bureau van Dijk

Bureau van Dijk is one of the world's most influential business information publishers, founded in 1991 in Brussels. Its value proposition is built around Orbis — the largest commercial database of information on private companies globally — and a suite of analytical tools that enable banks, financial institutions, consultants, and government agencies to access structured data on tens of millions of companies worldwide. At a time when information on private companies was fragmented and difficult to obtain, Bureau van Dijk created a systematic aggregator with high data normalisation standards, becoming critical infrastructure for M&A due diligence, credit risk analysis, tax evasion investigations, and KYC/AML compliance procedures. In 2017, Moody's — the global rating agency — acquired Bureau van Dijk for $3.27 billion, one of the largest acquisitions in the financial information sector that year, recognising the strategic value of the database and the competitive moat built over thirty years of data collection.