Does anyone know how do examiners get access to this data? Is there a specific access that would provide statistics for small business w/ revenues of $1M or less?
Thanks,

There's no free access to it. You have to buy the data. D&B got smart, and I believe they are giving it to the examiners, so that examiners make it so everyone else has to buy the info from D&B.

Thanks.

In my opinion this is scandalous for 2 reasons: (1) it makes a proprietary database a monopoly-owned asset that an entire industry must acquire by bureaucratic fiat, and (2) the data is not transparent and I believe highly unreliable and misleading. I say it is unreliable because when I examine the business counts in different counties in the data used by the federal bank regulators and compare it to the transparent business demographics published in the Census County Business Patterns there always is a huge difference. Which data would you trust? Unfortunately, the CCBP breaks out business size by employee counts, not GAR.

I concur - the data isn't accurate. We bought the data a few years back to see who/where these small businesses were so that we could improve our numbers but also if they're out there why aren't they banking with us? What we found were entirely over-inflated numbers... SAE's developed specifically for one transaction, service providers with a single practice but multiple entity names for various offerings, the Etsy crowd, trusts with no borrowing needs, etc. In some instances the info was outdated and the entity we called upon was no longer in business. In short we generated no new business - the only outcome was frustration with the D&B comparison in that and future exams.

Even our examiners agree. The data isn't great but it's the only thing they've got. Now to make matters worse we're no longer HMDA reportable under the new thresholds and our peers of 50%-200% won't be either. So what will they use instead of the LAR? Another D&B report! Which is unclear as I wasn't aware the D&B had consumer data - so this will be interesting!

I have personally tested a small area of data from D&B, and found many closed businesses within their database. The same business showing up multiple times, etc. It's terrible.

This is why Ncontracts pushed the Fed to consider what they are calling the "Market Benchmark" in their latest CRA proposal, looking at what the public data for CRA and/or HMDA LAR records show is actually happening in a given area. It doesn't matter if Joe Business Owner owns a business in your area, or owns twenty businesses. What matters is if they actually want a loan and apply for one.

Hello,

I have noticed that all businesses are not signed up on D & B.

Is there another database we could use to get a count of the businesses in the area?

Thanks

My company has used the County Business Patterns for years to help our client banks. Unfortunately, it does not contain GAR data. It does distinguish the size of businesses based on the count of employees. I've complained for years to the agencies to no avail. However, I have noticed some examiners are now referring to the CCBP data in their CRA Public Evaluation comments.