How it started
History
The company has its origins in Credit Data Corporation, a business which was acquired by TRW Inc. in 1968, and subsequently renamed TRW Information Services.
In November 1996, TRW sold the unit, as Experian, to Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners. Just one month later, the two firms sold Experian to The Great Universal Stores Limited in Manchester, England, a retail conglomerate with millions of customers paying for goods on credit (later renamed GUS). GUS merged its own credit-information business, CCN, which at the time was the largest credit-service company in the UK, into Experian.
In October 2006, Experian was demerged from GUS and listed on the London Stock Exchange.
In August 2005, Experian accepted a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over charges that Experian had violated a previous settlement with the FTC. The FTC alleged that ads for the "free credit report" did not adequately disclose that Experian customers would automatically be enrolled in Experian's $79.95 credit-monitoring program.
Experian announced, in January 2008, that it would cut more than 200 jobs at its Nottingham office, and then shut down its Canadian operations on 14 April 2009.
From Wikipedia’s article on Experian, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2