Company History
The youngest of the three credit bureaus, TransUnion was created in 1968 as the holding company of the Union Tank Car Company. It entered the credit business in 1969 with the acquisition of the Credit Bureau of Cook County, Illinois. Shortly afterward, the company became the first credit bureau to use tape-to-disc transfers for accounts receivable data, making it faster, easier, and cheaper to update credit information.
In the years that followed, it continued to acquire credit bureaus in other major cities. By 1988, TransUnion established its presence nationally, monitoring the credit activities of virtually every market-active American. The real estate and analytical services departments were added in the 1990s.
For most of its existence, TransUnion had been a subsidiary of the Marmon Group, an association of 125 production and construction businesses. It formally detached from the group in 2005. Today, TransUnion is a private and independently owned company with 250 offices across the US.