

Cortera: Turning The Business Credit Rating Industry Upside Down - lwc123
http://larrycheng.com/2009/09/22/cortera-turning-the-business-credit-rating-industry-upside-down/

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jrockway
Something similar I have been thinking about for a while; credit rating for
businesses by consumers. Right now, we have ratings, which are basically
meaningless -- companies are not punished for being poorly rated. (Look at
AT&T, everyone hates them, yet they keep paying their iPhone bills.)

I want to get a critical mass of consumers so that poorly-behaving businesses
can be punished. If bank foo makes it a habit of not answering customer
support emails, then the base of consumers moves their accounts elsewhere.
(Bank foo does this to us; if your personal credit rating is below a certain
value, they won't offer their services to you.)

Sadly, I don't think this will ever work. Companies pay people millions to get
rid of bad customers, but consumers are happy to be jerked around if it's less
effort than not being jerked around. Too bad.

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eggoa
"At its most basic level, Cortera’s service enables any business to rate any
other business on how they pay their bills."

This isn't really a consumer issue. It doesn't reflect customer service, just
reliability in re bill-paying.

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jrockway
Hence the first few words of my post; "something similar". The similarity is
in the distributed and open nature of the data collection, instead of three
opaque credit bureaus.

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huhtenberg
I just ran a check on a publicly traded company that has about 300 employees
and several millions in annual sales. The company information Cortera showed
was plain wrong - under 5 employees, under 500k sales. It did however want $3
for further information.

If they can't get the basic information right, how reliable is their crowd-
sourced data ?

