The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
Bureau van Dijk is a business-intelligence and company-data publisher headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, now operating within Moody's Analytics. Its core product is Orbis, a database that aggregates and standardises information on more than 625 million public and private companies worldwide, pooling data from more than 170 independent providers to produce comparable records covering firmographics, financial statements, ownership structures, corporate hierarchies and M&A activity. The firm specialises in standardising private-company data, which is inherently harder to source and compare across jurisdictions than listed-company data; Orbis tracks over 1.9 billion corporate ownership links, allowing users to trace beneficial ownership and group structures across borders. The product line is segmented by use case: Amadeus covers pan-European company data, Zephyr covers M&A and IPO deal data, BankFocus covers banks and InsuranceFocus covers insurers, with delivery through a web interface, APIs, bulk feeds, cloud connections and Microsoft Office add-ins. Its customer base sits mainly in banking, insurance, corporate finance, professional services, government and academic research, using the data for credit analysis, KYC and anti-money-laundering screening, supplier and third-party risk, transfer pricing and M&A due diligence. The company's origins trace to Bureau Marcel van Dijk, a Brussels information business; it was reorganised in 1991 as Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing under Bernard van Ommeslaghe, who had taken over the earlier firm in 1985. Private equity firm EQT acquired Bureau van Dijk in September 2014; by 2016, according to EQT's own deal announcement, the company had grown revenue to EUR 258 million with EBITDA of EUR 132 million and datasets covering more than 220 million companies. EQT sold the business to Moody's Corporation in a deal announced 15 May 2017 and completed 10 August 2017, for an enterprise value of EUR 3.0 billion. Bureau van Dijk now operates inside Moody's Analytics, with Orbis marketed directly under the Moody's brand. In February 2025, Moody's launched Maxsight, a unified risk platform built on Orbis data alongside Moody's other risk datasets, part of a continued push to fold Bureau van Dijk's company data into Moody's broader analytics and risk-workflow tooling since the acquisition.
