That 2010 deal is among the deftest of Christian’s many deft moves. But there is no gloating. Not like Packer, who noted “you only get one Alan Bond in your lifetime, and I’ve had mine” after he pocketed up to $750 million in the famous Nine Network buyback. Christian can play the corporate diplomat.
“It was all about timing,” she says. “Ten years later, the world had changed completely and Australia was regarded by the D&B corporation as one of the growth markets. And they were willing and prepared to buy it back at a premium.”
Christian’s education – she earned an arts degree at the University of Melbourne – did not obviously prepare her for a career transforming credit reporting. But her upbringing had honed her business skills from childhood.
“My father has always been self-employed and we used to talk business all the time. Talking about business, customers and profitability was not an unusual thing growing up,” she says. “I was given responsibility from an early age and so I take it on fairly naturally.”
Christian stumbled into the credit reporting industry when it was still underdeveloped. “I started working for a company called College Mercantile in the mid-80s … I initially applied for a role as a business analyst or a business reporter, not realising that the role very much centred around credit reporting, credit analysis,” she says. “I soon got to really understand the purpose and importance of the role, particularly from a macro-economic perspective.”
By 1989, D&B acquired the business and Christian agreed to manage the integration. “I was given a lot of scope to be very innovative in driving synergies. We were using the latest technology, the latest data sources and it was very fulfilling,” she recalls.
Out of the blue, she was promoted to chief executive officer for Australia and New Zealand, the first woman to head a D&B country division and the first Australian to lead the local operation. “It was very much a career-changing moment,” she says.
At the start of the 2000s, Christian believed that D&B was an asset waiting to bloom and had a plan to expand it. The dot-com boom had diverted people’s attention from profitability, as companies spent wildly to create attention and grow revenue. “When that all came crashing down,” she says, “there was a return to good old-fashioned fundamentals like maintaining a healthy cash flow, having sufficient cash to meet operating expenses and obligations, and a focus on margins and profitability.”
And D&B was in the unique position of having the largest commercial database of Australian businesses and unique IP in terms of risk-scoring tools. “The data is updated more than one million times each day. It is an enormous repository of information,” she says.
“We were very clear that the company played a very important, integral part in the economy in that we helped companies either reduce their risk or increase their cash flow. But it was not well understood as a broad benefit to the business community.”
