Credit Bureaus Worldwide: The Working List

Before a single container ships, two questions decide whether you will ever read our collection briefings in anger: does this company exist as it claims, and how does it treat the people it already owes. Two questions, two different sources. The company registry — usually official, often free — answers the first: legal existence, registered officers, filings, sometimes accounts. The credit bureau — commercial, paid — answers the second: payment behavior, scores, incidents, exposure.

Creditors constantly consult one and skip the other. The registry tells you the company is real; the bureau tells you it is dangerous. You need both, and below is where to find them, country by country. This is a working list — the sources our own case teams pull before a file is accepted.

How to run the check

Four steps, twenty minutes, before any meaningful credit decision. Pull the registry extract and match the exact legal entity, registration number and signing officers against your contract — trading names are for brochures. Pull a bureau report and read the payment-experience section before the score. Check for court records, insolvency filings and liens where the jurisdiction publishes them. Then set the credit limit on what you found, not on what sales forecasted. The long version of this drill is in how to vet a foreign company.

Europe

EU-wide, the e-Justice Business Registers Interconnection System links national registries under one search — imperfect, improving, and free.

The Americas

American nuance worth knowing: there is no national US company registry — incorporation is state business, so check the state of incorporation and states of operation. The D&B file, with its payment-experience data, is the closest thing the US has to a national behavior record.

Middle East & Africa

In the Gulf, bureau coverage of pure B2B behavior is thinner than in Europe — which raises, rather than lowers, the value of the registry check and of local presence. It is also why our jurisdiction pages leans so heavily on procedure: where behavioral data is scarce, contractual and documentary discipline carries the weight.

Asia-Pacific

China deserves a sentence of its own: the state enterprise-credit system is public, free, and startlingly informative — administrative penalties, abnormal-operation listings, shareholder structure — and most foreign creditors have never opened it.

Global sources

When one report must cover many countries: Dun & Bradstreet and Creditsafe run the broadest cross-border report networks; CRIF covers much of Europe and Asia; the trade credit insurers — Allianz Trade, Coface, Atradius — sell country and buyer risk assessments built from their own claims data, which is the most honest dataset in the industry, since it is priced with their own money. OpenCorporates aggregates official registry data globally and free, and is the fastest first pass ever built.

Field note: a bureau score summarizes the past. A registry filing dated last week is the present. When the two disagree, believe the newer document.

What the report will and will not tell you

A business credit report shows legal identity, payment experiences, public incidents and a score. It does not show the order your debtor decides to pay when cash gets tight — that ranking is decided by leverage, which is what every other briefing on this blog is about. The list above tells you whether to extend credit. If you already did, and the answer is aging on your ledger, start with the country briefing on our jurisdictions hub — the machinery is waiting.

One housekeeping note: registries and bureaus merge, rebrand and change URLs with some enthusiasm. We review this list; if a source has moved since your last visit, the registry of the country in question is never more than one search away — and unlike your debtor, it always answers.