In today’s market place there are three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian and Transunion.  You’ll also find many smaller agencies that act as “affiliates” of one of the big 3 like CSC and CBCInnovis or others that service their local geographic area but have less than complete national coverage.

There are other companies like ChoiceData that act as sales agents that sell credit data that is supplied by one of the big three credit bureaus.  In addition, many companies like Credco and Kroll actually a whole army of these type companies act as a “broker” buying and selling your credit data.  Finally, other companies are consumer reporting companies as defined by federal law but let’s not confuse these with CREDIT reporting agencies.  Companies like LexisNexis and Intelius are in this category.

Now this can become quite confusing and quite frankly seem like a pretty crowded market place but follow me on this point…