In one of the more interesting acquisitions last year, Equifax picked up data enrichment provider Austin Tetra. Recently, the ever traveling and enterprising Michael Lamoureux took it upon himself to provide us with an updated as to how Equifax is digesting its recent Spend Management morsel.

What's most interesting about his write-up is it would appear that Equifax is starting to move down the path of developing a competitive offering to D&B's Open Ratings that goes beyond simply looking at credit scores to determine supplier operational and financial viability (with Austin Tetra's help). Still, their core procurement business is very much on the data enrichment side. Many used to look at them as a cheaper alternative to D&B to cleansing a supplier master, but this is not entirely fair (as Austin Tetra had specific areas of strength).

According to Michael, "they've spent a lot of time building integration solutions into many standard ERP, spend analysis, business intelligence, financial data stores, and sourcing platforms to allow you to get the data you need, where you need it, in the format you need it." Even if they fail to develop a predictive supply risk solution that goes beyond the business credit score, I'm guessing that with the increasing demand for spend visibility solutions, that they’ll be able to keep themselves busy in this area alone.

- Jason Busch