Credit Risk Assessment: Altares to Resell Tinubu's Analyst Reviews in France
Altares, the French arm of the Dun & Bradstreet business-data network, will begin selling analyst-written credit risk assessments produced by Tinubu to its own customers, turning a 20-year data relationship into a reseller arrangement for human-led credit analysis. The expansion, announced on 16 October 2026, arrives as French business failures sit at their highest level in two decades, a figure Altares itself publishes.
What are Altares and Tinubu actually offering?
Altares customers can now order bespoke creditworthiness assessments and written credit recommendations prepared by Tinubu's analysts, rather than relying on data and scores alone.
Those analysts draw on Altares D&B data already fed into Tinubu's data hub, then layer in local data sources, publicly available information and, with the client's permission, direct contact with the company under review. The assessments are produced by multilingual analysts working across several continents. Both firms pitch the service at cases where financial information is thin, or where a large exposure justifies a closer look, the situations in which a score alone leaves credit teams exposed.
The relationship itself is not new. Tinubu has used Altares D&B data for years, and the two firms have worked together for more than two decades. What changes is distribution: Altares is adding Tinubu's assessments to its own commercial catalogue, putting Tinubu's analysts in front of Altares' client base for the first time.
Why expand now, with French insolvencies at a 20-year high?
The timing tracks a sharp deterioration in corporate credit conditions that Altares measures directly.
In its latest insolvency study, published on 20 January 2026, Altares recorded 69,957 business failures in France in 2025, counting safeguards, receiverships and liquidations. That was up 3.1% on the year and the highest total in 20 years. The fourth quarter alone brought 19,024 failures, an absolute record for a Q4. The 2025 figure followed 67,830 in 2024, which had itself set a record at the time. Altares has flagged a possible easing in 2026 while urging caution.
For credit and finance teams, more failures means more counterparty risk per euro of trade extended, and more scrutiny of thin files. That is precisely the gap the Tinubu service is pitched at. Selling deeper analysis into a market where defaults are climbing is a counter-cyclical commercial move, and it puts Altares' macro research and its new product line on the same page.
How does human analysis fit a market racing to automate?
The service scales human judgement at a moment when much of credit and underwriting is moving toward automated scoring and AI.
Tinubu's own software uses artificial intelligence, for example to read insurance applications and help insurers interrogate their data. The assessments being distributed through Altares rest instead on multilingual analysts who interpret a company's circumstances and, where needed, call the company directly. The positioning is a bet that in difficult or high-exposure cases, buyers will still pay for a person to make the call. Whether that premium holds as automated credit tools improve is the open commercial question.
What do Altares and Tinubu each bring?
Altares is the exclusive partner of the Dun & Bradstreet network in France, Benelux and the Maghreb, part of a business-information group whose US parent dates to 1841. Altares says its database covers more than 600 million legal entities worldwide, including 11 million in France.
Tinubu, founded in 2000 and based near Paris, builds software for insurers handling complex risks, spanning trade credit and surety through to political risk, cyber, marine and commercial property. It says it supports more than 50 specialist insurers worldwide and draws on more than 25 years of experience. The company has been majority-owned by New York private-equity firm Long Arc Capital since a €53m investment in October 2017, a round in which the French state bank Bpifrance, a shareholder since 2011, also took part.
Why This Matters to FinanceX Readers
For credit managers, CFOs and trade-credit insurers, this deal signals where business-data providers now see margin: in the interpretation of data rather than in the volume of it, sold at the point in the cycle when buyers most need it. With French insolvencies at a 20-year high and only a tentative easing forecast, demand for defensible, documented credit decisions on weak or opaque counterparties is rising. The deal also sharpens a wider question for the sector. As automated scoring commoditises the baseline, the premium shifts to the analysts who can work the edge cases, and to whoever controls distribution to the credit teams that buy them.
