The webinar will detail how Ewing Irrigation utilizes a service from Cortera called Pulse. It is the most innovative and economical way to monitor your existing customers and research new prospects for credit risk.

Cortera Pulse is a proactive approach to credit risk management that keeps a watchful eye on over 20 million public and private companies in the United States. Rilus and his team are seeing a substantial benefit from the service and believe you will too.

Think of Circles as LinkedIn meets business credit reporting – the ease of joining a LinkedIn group meets the sharing of real deal/hard numbers of an offline credit group. Have a question about a business who you are about to extend credit? Now you can ask your peers with your own credit Circle. In just a few minutes you can create and invite your business friends and best of all it’s free to use and open to anyone. Need insights outside of your own network or entering a new market, simply browse the many existing Circles to the tap intelligence of thousands of others.

Business credit reporting, risk management tools and systems are hardly new – Cortera itself is one of the more successful providers of such solutions. But to date, such solutions run algorithms, business rules, and static, structured data feeds to help companies more efficiently identify risk. Cortera Circles will, in contrast, thrive off of ongoing and ever changing contributions and sharing between like-minded businesses. This dynamic information will be exclusively crowdsourced. Microgroups will serve the immediate needs of localized and project-specific audiences to provide insight into risks that are hyperlocal in nature and far too specific to be accurately addressed by traditional solutions. Today’s report-based solutions as point-in-time snapshots that immediately age—a result of decades old technology that has evolved little despite the social web’s impact on nearly every other aspect of business. In contrast, Cortera’s group sourced approach delivers a live risk assessment, continuously updated by the community.

Have a question about a business’s ability to pay their bills in a timely manner? We make it as simple as asking your Circle.

We are on stage during the first session: 8:30 – 9:45 AM.  Our group includes MoneyAisle, Fiserv, Wikinvest, Worklight, Visa, oFlows, eRollover, Bill.com and Cortera.

Stay tuned…we reveal what’s new from Cortera tomorrow morning.

Finovate Events (www.finovate.com) take place each spring in San Francisco and each fall in New York and are uniquely known for their fast-paced environment, and for the caliber of its attendees: executives, entrepreneurs and industry experts from across the spectrum of financial and banking technology.

Cortera’s presence at FinovateSpring follows up on our success at the DEMOFall 2009 Conference where we launched the Cortera Credit Exchange, the commercial credit industry’s first online community dedicated to business credit ratings and reviews.

While we can’t yet give you details on what Cortera plans to present at FinovateSpring 2010, we can say that we plan to unveil the next major step in our effort to modernize and reinvent business credit reporting and financial risk management.

Stay tuned…

All of the major bureaus compile reports in the same way – voluntary submission of accounts receivable information from thousands of companies, on a monthly basis. Without these contributions, there wouldn’t be business credit reports as we know them today. This cooperation has yielded decent coverage, but we have a long way to go for the level of coverage we see with consumer credit reports.

Holding the full flow of info sharing back are internal policies on keeping information confidential, company culture, or even tactical reasons, like accounting systems that make it difficult to extract the information on a regular basis.

Why should your company contribute?

Data (Accounts Receivables or “Trade”) contribution programs have been around for decades. In the U.S. alone, thousands of businesses participate and benefit from such programs. Participation typically involves securely sending your accounts receivable to the bureau on a monthly basis. Trade contribution helps the provider and other creditors benefit from transparency in the marketplace through commercial credit reports. The more businesses that contribute trade payment experience information, the more likely that you will be able to identify customer payment issues early and proactively — and the better protected everyone is in the marketplace. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts.

The primary benefit? You’ll likely get paid faster

Contributing to credit bureaus by providing trade information helps improve accounts receivables performance. By sharing payment experience you are improving the ability to set appropriate terms for credit extension based on actual payment experiences – ultimately improving the likelihood of customers paying on time. Companies are more likely to pay on time if they are aware that their payment experience is reported to the major credit bureaus, like (shameless plug) Cortera. It sounds simple, but most businesses take their reputations very seriously and will pay on time to avoid negative a credit rating. On the flip side, small businesses actually want you to report to help them build their credit report history.

Do you contribute to a commercial credit bureau? If not, we’d love to hear from you. In a future post I’ll answer many of the common questions people have about their contributions.

For example, in London, I spoke to a group of senior credit professionals about how the use of today’s social and web technologies are impacting the business credit profession. I expected (and got) a lively debate. For these types of conversations turned debates, I always start with: Who here, for business, uses Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? Hands go up with Twitter being the smallest and LinkedIn being the largest. Then I ask the simple question – who uses business credit reports? Everyone raises their hands. Now, who uses Google AFTER you pull a credit report to get more information about that business? All the hands in the room go up.

After several stories were shared about the how the free search actually revealed better insights, one comment caught me off guard. It was from perhaps the most senior person in the room in terms of industry experience, who shot out this: “Commercial credit bureaus, you are officially on notice – this is all going to be free one day, and we won’t be having this debate. There is going to be a better way. There has to, it’s only a matter of time.”

Back in the states, in New Jersey at a user group, I asked the same series of questions and got the exact same response. This time I’m interrupted by one credit manager with: “Who actually likes their current provider [he named the bureau]? Who thinks the data is up to date or accurate?” The whole room erupts into rants about how unreliable the information is for them. It’s not exactly a good sign when no one has anything good to say about their PAID information providers. This is especially rough to hear when you are one of the credit bureaus.

I then traveled to the Credit Research Foundation in San Diego and every conversation I have goes about the same – credit professionals are tired of the status quo. Over and over I heard from them that they are looking for something new.

I couldn’t agree more. Doing things the way we always have is broken. And it has always been broken. Only 10,000 businesses in the US contribute to commercial credit bureaus, yet there are 25 million businesses in the US – something is wrong with this picture.

We clearly need to do better. And while I think (shameless plug) that Cortera represents a significant step in the right direction. It’s only part of the giant leap we are encouraging the industry – and ourselves — to take in the near future.

Have a story to share about how you use the best of the social and free web in your credit decisions? Startlingly bad data from a high priced credit report? Suggestions on what the future of business credit info? Tell us below.

Check out this short video from our CEO Jim Swift to see how we are transforming the world of business credit reporting.

With that in mind, here are five simple steps every company should be proactively taking in 2010 to put themselves in the best possible credit position:

1. Establish a credit file at the major credit bureaus. Many years ago there was only one major bureau – Dun & Bradstreet. Today the business credit reporting landscape has changed, so make sure you establish a credit file at ALL of the major bureaus (Dun & Bradstreet, Experian, Equifax and Cortera)
2. Get your suppliers involved – they’ll love you for it. If you are financially healthy and meeting your own profitability goals, your suppliers and vendors will obviously benefit as you grow and thrive. Encourage them to report to the major credit bureaus (see above) so that you get credit (no pun intended) for regularly paying your bills on time.
3. Pay your vendors and suppliers on time – it might even save you money. Sounds simple, but if you are not paying your bills in a timely manner it will negatively impact your business credit report and will eventually hurt your ability to obtain business credit in the future. Many vendors also provide discounts if you pay early, so if you get in a cash flow habit of paying before the invoice is due, you’ll often save 2% or more off your invoice.
4. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Whether you are extremely profitable with plenty of cash on hand or struggling to pay your next invoice, keeping your suppliers in the loop goes a long way in negotiating your terms – and keeping a positive credit history intact. Never go completely dark and stop returning inquiries. And never stretch out payments without being up front and transparent with your suppliers as to why you may need to pursue such a tactic. This will alienate your suppliers, lead them to cut you off completely, or worse, encourage them report such delinquencies to the major credit bureaus. Lack of transparency will handcuff your business and potentially cause you even more pain.
5. Monitor your own credit report. Just like you monitor your personal credit report, you should do the same for your business. Small discrepancies or disputes can mean the difference in receiving business credit or being denied.

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