Chief Executive Officer & Director, DUN & BRADSTREET HOLDNGS INC
Dun & Bradstreet CEO Anthony Jabbour on company's IPO
Anthony Jabbour, CEO of Dun & Bradstreet, joins "Squawk Alley" after the company's IPO. For access to live and exclusive video ...
About Anthony Jabbour
Anthony Jabbour, CEO of Dun & Bradstreet, discussed the company's IPO in September 2020, stating that the timing was driven by the company's transformation in areas including executive leadership, technology, and data analytics. He described the company as operating in a large and growing market, with the goal of helping clients use data to grow revenues, improve margins, and stay compliant. Jabbour noted that the company's recent acquisitions were focused on different areas, including analytics, digital business views, and collections capabilities. Jabbour also commented on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, saying that demand for the company's data and insights had increased. He stated that during the 2009 recession, Dun & Bradstreet's revenues fell only 2 percent compared to a 13 percent decline for many organizations, and predicted that the need for data to support remote sales would continue to grow in a post-pandemic world.
Transcript (12 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
Not via zoom, Anthony, but from the stock exchange itself. Congratulations, welcome.
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Anthony Jabbour0:02
Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here, and I wish all 4,000 of our colleagues worldwide could be here with me. We've got such a storied history in this great company, and this is a really important milestone in our transformation. We're just so excited about the future.
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Interviewer0:21
It is a storied brand. I forget how many clients? Almost 200,000 clients, 90% of the Fortune 500. We know it's a good time for public market analytics. How much of that fed the timing of the IPO?
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Anthony Jabbour0:35
Really, what fed the timing of the IPO for us was just where we were in the transformation of the company. We really felt that we had great momentum going. We went through a significant transformation in five parts: first, getting new executive leadership including a board, organization changes, and then changes with our go-to-market, our technology, our data and analytics. We just felt the timing was really right for us. Our message was resonating with clients, and we had really fast followership with our employees, so we felt now is a great time to come out.
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Interviewer1:12
How would you characterize competition in the space right now? Vis-a-vis Bloomberg or anyone else, how intense is it? Is it getting more intense?
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Anthony Jabbour1:23
Well, we're in a very large market that's growing. The need for data and insights from that data is very large and it's only going to grow larger over time. So there's a lot of opportunity out there for us to help our clients find ways for us to help them leverage our data and analytics to drive insights that will drive actions and outcomes. That will help them grow their revenues, improve their margins, and stay compliant so they can wake up the next day and do it all over again. We feel real good about where we sit in the landscape today.
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Interviewer1:55
Anthony, good morning. I want to ask you about M&A. It's John. You mentioned it in the S-1. You talked about how you've integrated a Lattice, CoAction, or Intelligence. What is the opportunity here in terms of the size of company, the expertise of company, whether it's AI or big data, that you're looking to acquire? And are the valuations okay?
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Anthony Jabbour2:22
The beautiful thing with Dun & Bradstreet is we have such a broad framework for us to build on. You can see those three acquisitions: they were very different in many respects. One was leveraging analytics to sit on top of our data for a sales and marketing AI perspective; another was taking the tremendous information we have on businesses and getting a digital view of those businesses through the Orb acquisition; and the last one was really use cases. If you think about what we do as a company, how we help businesses market and prospect, we also help them onboard clients, make sure they should be doing business with them, extend credit and how much credit. The last use case through CoAction was really a collections capability—it was the next logical adjacency. So there's so much that we can do in the space from an M&A perspective, with such a broad client base for us to grow from.
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Interviewer3:15,
Anthony, you mentioned credit, and I can't help but wonder given the economic situation that we're in now during this pandemic, is there a set of data that's going to be more in demand, more important to parse more intelligently, given that it's hard to know how healthy a particular business is based on what it did months ago, given what's happening now?
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Anthony Jabbour3:41
That's such an important point you're making and a great question. It's absolutely true. What we're seeing right now is our data and our insights are in more demand than ever. In times like this, you've got to be more right than wrong, so being this much more accurate is worth this much more. When we look back to the last recession in 2009, we saw some of that as well. When there are trying times, for a lot of organizations the S&P revenues fell about 13% at the time, and ours stayed strong at 2%. So it's times like this where the information you can get from data is so important. And further, with COVID and... I apologize.
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Interviewer4:24
No, that's okay. Go ahead, Anthony.
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Anthony Jabbour4:27
I was just going to say, in a post-COVID world, when you think there will be less travel, less face-to-face meetings, less conferences, less trade shows, the need for data and insights to help drive sales more remotely will continue to be more and more important. The trend was heading there, and this pandemic is just exacerbating it.