Bisnode Business Contacts - Dun & Bradstreet

Overview

Bisnode Business Contacts in 2 minutes

With Bisnode Business Contacts you can:

Get access to 40 million business contacts in 21 European countries
Identify not only companies, but also related worksites and decision makers
Make sure all your company data is always updated and correct
Create a single customer view across all your systems and platforms with unique ID:s for each entity
Ensure compliance of your company data management to GDPR

European company data available through a single API

Real time updates of customer data in all your business systems

Bisnode Business Contacts provides you with one integration access to unique European Company data in 21 countries. Integration with our API will ensure updated customer data in all your business systems. That creates an opportunity to improve your sales process and customer experience throughout the customer journey.

Get help to be compliant with GDPR

Get a single customer view with our unique ID

One key concept within Bisnode Business Contacts is the unique entity ID. This is designed to be a unique, persistent ID for entities within Bisnode, which facilitates for you to be able to get a single customer view across all your databases and systems. This is a necessity to be GDPR-compliant.

Structure your data and find relations

Identify not only companies, but also related offices and decision makers

There are three different entity types in the Bisnode Business Contacts API: Company, Worksite and Employment. Each entity has its own unique ID. From Company comes the ID for all associated Worksites, and from each Worksite comes the ID for all associated Employments. This means that you can create a structured hiarchy in your company data, and identify relevant relations and decision makers for your business.

Authentication

To use the Credit Information B2B REST API - v2, you need a client ID and a secret. Bisnode uses OAuth2 for authentication. More information here.

How to use the API

This guide is intended to help you get going with your integration against the Bisnode Business Contacts API. It serves as a complement to the  Endpoint Reference  and aims to bring a high level understanding of the key concepts of the platform.

Schemas are provided for all entity types in this documentation. Most data provided in this API is optional, i.e., a particular field specified in the schema may not appear in the response if no such information is available for that particular entity. An API client should keep this in mind and properly handle missing information.

For questions and support, please contact Bisnode at api-support@bisnode.com

Entity types and ID:s in Bisnode Business Contacts API

One key concept within Bisnode Business Contacts is the unique entity ID. This is designed to be a unique, persistent ID for entities within Bisnode.

There are three different entity types in the Bisnode Business Contacts API:

Company
The legal, cohesive company, which may have several subordinate worksites

Worksite
The physical worksite, which may comprise a head office or branch

Employment
Decision makers at a particular worksite/office

Each entity has its own unique ID. From Company comes the ID for all associated Worksites, and from each Worksite comes the ID for all associated Employments.

Key Features

This method is recommended when direct contact exists with somebody who is able to confirm an identity – such as, for example, via a CRM, app or the web.

Select
Select is used in order to find new customers and to make a selection from a large amount of prospects for a campaign.

Match
This method is recommended for companies whose customer data is unsatisfactory, or when one wishes to supplement a request with Bisnode’s unique ID number in order to exclude certain entities from a prospect selection.

Download
Through Match, Select och Search you can identify the entities that are of interest for you. Via Download you can then get updated and enriched information about these entities.

Subscribe
Keep your data updated and enriched over time by subscribing for changes and new entitites.

Read more about each key feature below, and in the section Endpoint reference.

Search process

1. The client sends a search request to the API containing criteria with significant identification value

2. The API responds with a result that contains basic data in order to confirm the identity

3. A new request is sent, in order to retrieve further information about the selected entity. For output, see the Download section.

Select process

1. Select the entities you wish to be included in your selection by choosing selection criteria

2. In the next step, you get the number of entities within your chosen selection

3. If you are happy with the count, you can go further and retrieve the unique IDs within your selection, which will enable you to exclude any existing IDs

4. Finally, you can download all the selected entities to obtain complete information. For content of the output, see the Download section.

Match process

1. The integrator submits a query to the matching endpoint containing those entities that are to be matched

2. The response contains Matching Type, Status, Customer id and Bisnode Business Contacts ID (worksite and company ID)

3. If Multiple hits are chosen you can review the hits and choose the ones that are correct

4. Download your matched customers. For content of the output, see the Download section.

Download process

Submit Company, Worksite or Employment ID:s, retrieved from Search, Select or Match. There are three available information packs to download: Company, Worksite and Employment. See Endpoint Reference for content in each pack.

From Company comes the ID:s for all associated Worksites, and from each Worksite comes the ID:s for all associated Employments, so you can combine these information packs and create a structure and hierarchy in your company data.

Note that there is variation in the coverage of the variables in the information packages and in different countries.

Countries that are covered in Bisnode Business Contacts are Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

Subscribe process

1. The integrator submits a query to the subscribe endpoint containing Bisnode Business Contacts IDs from your previous download, that are of interest to monitor

2. If the entity has changed since last modified date, you will get information which fields that have changed, and if there are any deleted or new worksites and/or employments

3. Download your updated customers with complete information

Working with VAT and National Registration Numbers

The Bisnode Business Contacts API uses its own entity IDs to download and request changes for companies, worksites and employments. This means that to download and request changes for an entity you need to know its entity ID.

To make it easy to work with VAT or national registration numbers, the API provides the possibility of searching by registration numbers and VAT numbers. When downloading a company resource these can be found in the fields nationalRegistrationNumber and vatNo, respectively. You may also search a company or worksite based on these numbers. The outline below illustrates how to convert organization or VAT numbers to Bisnode Business Contacts IDs.

Use the Search endpoint for companies and filter on nationalRegistrationNumber and companyStatus like so:

1. Search active companies with the desired VAT/registration number, for example: /companies?companyNumber=5564363421&companyStatus=ST00. The companyNumber parameter is used to specify either the VAT or national registration number. The parameter companyStatus=ST00 means that only active companies will be returned.

2. Make sure there is only one hit among the search and extract the ID of that hit. You can now use this ID to download complete company information and use it to query for changes. It is recommended that you save this ID along with the company information to easily query for changed properties.

You can do the same for official worksite numbers if this exists in the country, for example for SE you can search on "cfar".