Visa Inc.

Bank of America launched the BankAmericard in Fresno, California in September 1958 by mailing unsolicited credit cards to 60,000 residents — a practice called "dropping" that was later made illegal. The experiment was chaotic: thousands of people who had received cards they never requested ran up debts they couldn't repay. Within a year, 22% of accounts were delinquent. Bank of America lost millions. The programme nearly ended before it began. The bank persisted, improved its credit screening, and the BankAmericard gradually became viable.

Bank of America began licensing the BankAmericard to other banks in 1966, creating a fragmented network with no consistent standards. Dee Hock, a banker with no establishment credentials, proposed a radical solution: a non-stock membership corporation owned by its member banks, with no central authority but shared infrastructure. The concept — which Hock called a "chaordic" organisation, combining chaos and order — was unlike any corporate structure that existed. It worked. The organisation was renamed Visa in 1976.

The name Visa was chosen in 1976 because it was recognisable in every language, required no translation, and — unlike BankAmericard — did not suggest it was owned by a single bank. The rebranding coincided with international expansion. Visa established the technical infrastructure for electronic payment authorisation that allowed a card issued by any member bank to be accepted at any merchant anywhere in the world — a network effect that became almost impossible to replicate and gave Visa its permanent competitive advantage.

Visa went public in March 2008 — two weeks before Bear Stearns collapsed — raising $17.9 billion in the largest IPO in U.S. history at the time. The timing was extraordinary: one of the largest financial transactions in history completed days before the financial crisis erupted. Visa's stock held up while bank stocks collapsed, because Visa earned fees on transaction volume regardless of whether cardholders paid their bills — the credit risk belonged to the issuing banks, not to Visa.

Visa and Mastercard together process approximately 80% of all credit and debit card transactions globally — a duopoly that has attracted regulatory attention for decades. The U.S. Department of Justice sued Visa in September 2024, alleging it had illegally maintained its debit card monopoly by paying banks and merchants to avoid routing transactions through competing networks. The lawsuit was the most significant antitrust challenge to Visa since its 2008 IPO and threatened the fee structure that had made it one of the most profitable companies in the world.