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

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

What a great day at DEMOfall 09! Today, we unveiled a fundamentally new approach to commercial credit reports by adding the real-time voice of the business community. Are you a small business owner? A finance manager at a Fortune 500 company? Or a veteran credit pro at a company somewhere in between? The Cortera Credit Exchange might just be the information solution you’ve been looking for.

Credit Decisions are Now Social

Join the first community dedicated to making the flow of business credit information as free and widely available than ever before. We’ve taken a basic commercial credit report, put it online for free, and then made it social, creating the first website where you can share your customer payment experience with other decision makers. Just like the many consumer and business online communities you’ve come to rely on every day, you can join for free, glean insight from user reviews, and even write a few of your own.

Harness the Power of Thousands of Credit Professionals

The Cortera Credit Exchange brings together the collective wisdom of the commercial credit community. In a few clicks, you can join Cortera and get ratings from your peers–giving your direct access to the type of information you’ve always wanted. The community brings online what already is being used daily in conference rooms, on the phone and over lunch. You’ll find timely reviews on businesses of all sizes, and you can even add your own review to provide your unique insights.

What’s the Catch?

There is no catch. We believe strongly that the commercial credit reporting system is currently broken and can be improved through the flow of free and drastically lower priced premium information. Want a traditional credit report? We have those too, just at price that might surprise you. Need corporate family information, business scoring on many businesses or business demographic information? We’ve got you covered.

The basic credit report information and community is free to use. It’s that simple.

Join the Community Today – It’s Free

Leverage the collective experiences of credit professionals, business executives, and owners like you to make better decisions. Getting started is easy and won’t cost you a thing—all you have to do is register.

Tell us what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

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 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.