Jim and Alex on stage demoing the Cortera Credit Exchange at DEMOfall 09.

Join the Cortera Credit Exchange at www.cortera.com.

It’s official. We are excited to announce the first community-driven approach to commercial credit reporting. Business decision makers from small business owners to senior executives of large corporations can now leverage the collective insights of the entire credit community. Using familiar ratings and reviews features popularized on sites like Yelp, Amazon, and TripAdvisor, members can share payment experiences with other credit pros and business owners by writing their own reviews, while utilizing the knowledge of their peers when making credit decisions by reading reviews submitted by other users.

Our goal is to fill an information gap we’ve heard about since our founding over 15 years ago: business credit reports – used to determine credit viability and payment terms – are based on the financial transactions of less than 1% of US businesses. Over 50% of the US GDP is provided by companies that have little or no voice in how they are perceived in traditional credit reports – small businesses found on Main Street in every town in the country. In what amounts to a calculated compromise, these reports are often derived from interactions with only the largest businesses. The majority of interactions with small businesses are often ignored. It’s the all-too-often lost insights contained within those millions of experiences that Cortera aims to recapture by embracing a more social approach.

With this new solution we are simply revitalizing an approach that had been in place since the 1800s – local merchants exchanging trade references in communities throughout the country. And that’s the key. The Cortera Credit Exchange is a community platform, designed to take these traditionally offline communities and peer networks that have long contributed knowledge and experience for the greater good and bring them online — a technological evolution of one of the oldest and most trusted social networks in business history.

Our mission is straightforward. It is time for business decisions and control over the granting of credit that powers over 50% of US GDP to be returned to those that have been left behind: small businesses.

• Read the official press release here
• Watch us live at DEMO here
• Give it a try for yourself here

We are excited to announce that Cortera will be launching our latest innovation next week at DEMOfall ’09.  Read the official announcement here.

Stay tuned to our blog for more big announcements and follow us on Twitter for live tweets right from the show floor.

We are happy to announce that we have launched a simple and inexpensive subscription service that allows members to access a variety of our premium business information for a flat monthly fee. The new subscription service offers an even more convenient way of purchasing than before by offering users access to an unlimited number of business profiles all at the industry’s lowest prices. Of course, members can still access our free information on millions of businesses and buy our premium credit reports on a one off basis.

Three New Premium Subscription Plans:

Basic Plan: $29/month/user (subscribe to the Cortera Basic Plan)

• Month-to-month pricing (cancel any time)
• Unlimited searches and reports
• Business contact information (address, phone, website, map)
• Demographics (SIC, sales range, employee range, year founded, ownership, industry)
• Business Contact
• Parent Headquarters Name
• Payment Risk Rating (1 – 5 star rating on payment reliability)
• Payment Risk Summary (DBT, total balance, % current, % 90+ past due, total balance)

Expert Plan: $49/month/user (subscribe to the Cortera Expert Plan)

• Builds on the everything above in the Basic plan PLUS more
  • Payment risk score
  • Number of trade lines
  • Payment risk score trend graph
  • Supplier volume per year
  • Shipping spend per year
  • Spending level per year

Power Plan: $249/month/user (subscribe to the Cortera Power Plan)

• Builds on the everything above in the Expert plan PLUS more
  • Unlimited credit reports
  • Cortera risk segment
  • Monthly aging balances
  • Bankruptcy indicator
  • Family tax liens & civil judgments indicator
  • Commercial collections activity indicator

How does “free” sound? That’s right. Cortera is your source for free business credit reports on over 6 million companies. That might sound crazy, but we believe it’s time for you to have easier and less expensive access to business credit information so that you can make better business decisions. If you’re tired of expensive, long-term contracts to access credit reports from the Other Guy, you’ve come to the right place.

You’re probably thinking, “c’mon, there must be a catch.” There’s not. We’ve been compiling credit reports the same way the Other Guy does for more than 10 years. Thousands of customers rely on our credit reports every day to support their business risk management. They love the accuracy and ease-of-use of our credit reports. We think you will too.

So stop spending too much and getting frustrated by the Other Guy.  Start using Cortera’s free business credit reports instead.

The Other Guy’s Pricing is from the Dark Ages

The cost of collecting and distributing business information drops every year, yet the public continues to pay as if business credit data was still being gathered in the coffee houses and counting rooms of the 1860s. With the Other Guy, you get locked into “unlimited access” programs with complex pricing schemes that increase exponentially every year. You’re locked in so that their shareholders stay happy. What about your happiness? Why aren’t you reaping the savings from technology innovation?

You get those savings with Cortera. Start with our free business credit reports and upgrade to low-priced premium reports or nearly-free monthly subscriptions if you like what you see but need more information. And cancel any time you like. If you don’t like our products, we don’t deserve your business.

You Can Have High Quality at Inexpensive Prices

As a credit and collections technology innovator for the last 16+ years, we feel it is time for a change in the commercial credit reporting space. By listening to our highly active user community and delivering the solutions they really want, we have earned the respect and trust of some of the largest companies in the world. We’ve heard you loud and clear that you want better information at fair prices. So our mission is simple – we’ll continue to listen to your needs and deliver high quality information in return.

Getting Started is Easy

Visit www.cortera.com to start searching the 6 million free credit reports available today. The reports include business contact information, business demographics (revenue, number of employees, industry and more) and a payment rating. If you need more, we have a premium report that includes detailed payment behavior data, trade lines, and more for only $3.00. That’s a fraction of the price the Other Guy charges. We also have nearly-free monthly subscriptions for unlimited access.

Stay tuned. There’s more exciting stuff coming your way soon.

In the rapidly rising sea of information, someone got left at the dock.  It’s easy to find information on public companies.  Just go to Yahoo! Finance or do a Google search.  But go ahead and try to find information on private companies – especially the millions of smaller ones that we all interact with every day.  The limited information available about them is scattered across a multitude of hard-to-find sources and largely unstructured.

The landscape is changing.  This weekend, Cortera launched a new source of free information on small and medium sized privately held businesses (as well as large and public ones).  Cortera business profiles help businesses more easily find companies who can deliver what they need, gain insight into the stability and credibility of their existing trading partners, and identify new customers in need of their products.  Containing detailed information on business size, industry, real-world trade payment history, recent news and more, the business profiles enable companies to grow their businesses and manage risk.

Our initial launch is concentrated on the world of suppliers.  Cortera’s business profiles are designed for both suppliers and the companies that buy from them.  For buyers, Cortera profiles improve their ability to find suppliers and evaluate their health to avoid supply chain disruptions.  For suppliers, Cortera profiles assist in finding potential buyers and assessing both their capacity to spend and ability to pay.

There are millions of daily interactions between buyers and suppliers that are begging for better intelligence.  Our objective is to provide a new level of insight into private companies to support these interactions at either free or near-free price points.

We believe that greater transparency into businesses will lead to smarter commerce between them.

You might have noticed that we launched a new, satirical marketing campaign a couple of weeks ago to help bring attention to the important and increasingly difficult commercial accounts receivable management function. Now more than ever it is essential that organizations operate at peak performance across all levels of risk management, yet often times credit and collections functions are still viewed as back-office non-essential departments. Obviously this is not the case, especially in 2009.

In the world of “do more with less”, we hope that “Collectile Dysfunction” added some comic relief to your increasingly busy and often stressful day. Whether you love it or hate it, laughed out loud or think it is just another juvenile stunt to get attention, there is common ground among credit and collections pros that companies now more than ever need to keep pace with the current economic challenge. I’ve been on the road visiting customers throughout the spring and every company lists off a common set of stress points:

• Increased DSO and delinquencies
• Increasing internal reporting requirements for lenders, senior management and auditors
• Layoffs throughout the finance organization, especially analyst and collectors
• Reduced budgets
• More time in court because of customer bankruptcies
• Added work of analyzing partners and suppliers
• More analysis of private company financials
• Higher than usual friction with sales
• Collections challenges as entire portfolios are becoming more risky
• Surprises in the portfolio as good customers are going bad

We reported just this week that the national percent past due average now stands at 12.95% with 40 states worsening month over month. Clearly, despite some well publicized “signs of improvement” businesses are still struggling to pay their bills in timely manner stressing the entire cash conversion cycle. To make matters worse the aggregate amount of US commercial A/R debt over 90 days past due has grown 15.4% over the last four months. This is a concern given the fact that the later the payment, the more likely the supplier will not be able to collect.

While the Collectile Dysfunction or the CD Campaign is a tongue and cheek approach, the message is clear and well known by credit and collection professionals-many organizations need help and need help now to regain control over their portfolio. This is not a criticism, but simply the current reality and result of long-term company cultural norms that tend to focus on near-term sales goals with little attention to the risk of being ultimately paid for their products and services. As result the upfront risk assessment and ongoing management of the A/R portfolio tends to be underfunded and under staffed.

Do any of the following sound like your company?

• Sales & senior management overriding credit line decisions
• Orders being released off credit hold to make a shipping deadline or quarterly number
• Auto setup of “courtesy credit lines” without credit providing guidance or input
• Credit decisions based on “personal” relationships or history rather than factual analysis
• Requests for modern software and information falling to the bottom of the IT & budget priority list

Perhaps one of the positive outcomes of the credit crunch and recession is that senior management is now increasingly listening to their A/R leadership while in boom times perhaps they did not-hopefully in an effort to eliminate their “CD” for good.
We are passionate about bringing attention to the often overlooked trade receivables side of the struggling US economy. If the CD campaign helps draw attention to the issue and gets you the support and tools you need most, we’ve succeeded.

Tell us what you think.

Over the last few weeks I have had the opportunity to participate in an industry credit group meeting both in the United States and in Europe. In both cases, the importance of these meetings was clear given the challenging economic environment. While attendance is down at some these meetings because of the well publicized cuts or complete freezes in corporate travel, I was still impressed at the level of continued participation and attendance. It is refreshing to see that senior management is still supportive of these meetings.

Are you getting pressure to cut back on these meetings? Is upper management questioning the value, given budget cuts in other areas? Here are some tips and benefits to help you justify attendance.

Key Benefits of Participation in a Credit Group

Transfer knowledge, new strategies, tips and best practices

• With collections activities up significantly and disputes on the rise credit groups provide the perfect setting for sharing best practices and successful credit, collections and risk management techniques (both new and old)
• Outside experts can also provide unique insights and additional support that are often more expensive to obtain for a single company (many experts will participate at no cost to promote their company or credentials to potential customers in the group). In my case I was invited last week to run a workshop and presented on Collecting in an Economic Downturn
• Attendees often learn from their peers about the latest technology, information, and scoring products

Trade experiences

• Providing your company’s monthly trade experience information to your industry credit group (and all commercial credit bureaus) provides better transparency and has been shown to improve payment behavior
• Submitters often receive additional services such as credit scores, delinquency predictor scores or unique identifier information at no cost in return for providing their A/R experience
• In a live and confidential setting, sharing past facts on your experiences with customers provides unique commentary not found on a generic credit report
• Members benefit from the collective credit investigation capabilities of the entire group and their respective departments
• Benchmarking and industry trends, like those provided by Cortera, help members understand their performance versus their peers

Relationship building

• Long-term support of these groups builds invaluable relationships with your peers that helps protect the entire industry against fraud and frequent late payers
• Member sharing also helps build better information and technology solutions that are specific to the trade group

Member alerting

• The peer-driven, member alerting services provided by most credit groups are essential for communicating between meetings and ensuring the immediate flow of potential industry or customer risk. These services are only available to group members and cannot be purchased if you are not an active member
• Meeting hosts further expand this communication through delivering timely industry news, best-practices, and company-level insights to ensure regular knowledge transfer back to the credit group

Lowering Travel Costs

• Attend local regional meetings. These are often off-shoots of the national meetings and provide helpful member experience both locally and nationally
• Encourage members of the credit team to attend in their region and communicate to the national or global team
• Host meetings at your facilities to avoid hotel expenses
• Participate via conference call if you cannot attend in person

Have a tip or comment? Add it below to keep the sharing going.

Commercial Credit & Collections Professionals (within corporations and at 3rd party collections agencies) face one of the most challenging collections environments in a generation. With the economy in a recession and with many banks unable or unwilling to provide debt financing, companies are being forced to rely more and more on their vendors to finance their working capital. As a result, both collections departments and agencies are facing rapidly increasing volumes of delinquent accounts. Lurking inside those increasingly delinquent portfolios are tomorrow’s dead beats and bankrupt companies. However many of those accounts are just temporarily slowing their payments in an effort to get back on their feet. How is a collections or credit professional to tell the difference? How can a collections department maximize performance against key objectives such as Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) in such a challenging environment?

With this tough environment in mind, we are pleased to announce the launch of Cortera’s Collections Priority Rating – CPR℠ to help you prioritize your collections efforts. These days it is essential for businesses to focus their collections activities on their increasing challenging customer portfolios. Cortera Collections Priority Rating – CPR is designed to assist collections departments do just that.

Cortera CPR assists collections departments of all sizes in evaluating customer portfolios for signs of delinquency, highlights changes in payment behavior and provides indications of internal and external events that could impact future payment behavior. Cortera CPR also provides a unique segmentation feature that groups accounts based on overall payment risk. This can assist customers in prioritizing, assigning and ultimately the treatment of past due accounts.

Like all Cortera products, Cortera CPR is offered in a variety of flexible delivery methods:

• Online via our DIG web portal in report form for individual company analysis at $2.00 (discounts are available for data contributors)
• Batch via our BOOST product for rapid analysis and segmentation of all or part of your customer portfolio at $0.60 per account scored (discounts are available for data contributors)
• Web Service via our CONNECT XML for access to all Cortera CPR data elements and easy integration to your existing accounting and collections software.

If you are interested in learning more please call 877-LOWR-DSO (877-569-7376) or complete a short form for a free trial.