Visa Inc.

Visa Inc. is an American multinational corporation that handles payment card services, with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. Its main function is enabling electronic funds transfers across the globe, primarily through Visa-branded credit, debit, and prepaid cards. The company itself does not issue cards, provide credit, or determine rates and fees for consumers. Instead, it supplies financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products, which those institutions then use to offer credit, debit, prepaid, and cash access programs to their customers. In 2025, Visa’s global network, known as VisaNet, processed 257.5 billion transactions totaling US$14.2 trillion.

Visa began in 1958 as the BankAmericard credit card program, created by Bank of America (BofA). After competitor Master Charge (now Mastercard) emerged, BofA started licensing the BankAmericard program to other financial institutions in 1966. Tensions grew over BofA’s licensing outside its own network, leading Dee Hock—who joined in 1968 to manage the card’s rollout in the Pacific Northwest—to convince the bank that BankAmericard could thrive as an independent entity. By 1970, BofA handed control of the program to the card-issuing banks, which formed National BankAmericard with Hock as president and CEO. The organization was renamed Visa in 1976.

Almost all Visa transactions are processed through the company’s directly operated VisaNet, which runs on four secure data centers: in Ashburn, Virginia, and Highlands Ranch, Colorado, in the United States; London, England; and Singapore. These facilities are heavily protected against natural disasters, crime, and terrorism, can operate independently of each other and external utilities if needed, and can handle up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and 100 billion computations per second.

Visa is the world’s second-largest card payment organization (combining debit and credit cards), having been surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015 based on annual value of card transactions and number of cards issued. However, because UnionPay’s size largely reflects its domestic market in China, Visa remains the dominant bankcard company elsewhere, holding a 50% market share of total card payments.

**History**

On September 18, 1958, Bank of America officially launched its BankAmericard credit card program in Fresno, California. In the weeks before the launch, BofA saturated Fresno mailboxes with an initial mass mailing (or “drop”) of 65,000 unsolicited credit cards. BankAmericard was the idea of BofA’s in-house product development think tank, the Customer Services Research Group, led by Joseph P. Williams. Williams convinced senior BofA executives in 1956 to let him pursue what became the world’s first successful mass mailing of unsolicited credit cards (actual working cards, not just applications) to a large population.

Williams’ key achievement was successfully implementing the all-purpose credit card—not inventing the concept. By the mid-1950s, the typical middle-class American already had revolving credit accounts with multiple merchants, which was inconvenient and inefficient due to carrying many cards and paying separate bills each month. The financial industry recognized the need for a unified instrument, but no one had figured out how to do it. Charge cards like Diners Club existed (requiring full payment each billing cycle), and by the mid-1950s, there had been at least a dozen attempts to create an all-purpose credit card. Those earlier attempts failed because they were run by small banks lacking resources. Williams and his team studied those failures and believed they could avoid the same mistakes; they also studied successful revolving credit operations at Sears and Mobil Oil. Fresno was chosen for its population of 250,000 (large enough to support a credit card, small enough to control startup costs), BofA’s 45% market share there, and its relative isolation, which would limit public relations damage if the project failed. According to Williams, Florsheim Shoes was the first major retail chain to agree to accept BankAmericard.

The 1958 test initially went smoothly, but BofA panicked when it confirmed rumors that another bank was about to launch its own drop in San Francisco, BofA’s home market. By March 1959, drops began in San Francisco and Sacramento; by June, BofA was dropping cards in Los Angeles; by October, the entire state of California had been saturated with over 2 million credit cards, and BankAmericard was accepted by 20,000 merchants. However, the program was riddled with problems. Williams, who had never worked in a bank’s loan department, had been too trusting in customers’ basic goodness, and he resigned in December 1959. Twenty-two percent of accounts were delinquent, far above the expected 4%, and police departments across the state faced numerous incidents of the new crime of credit card fraud. Politicians and journalists joined the uproar against Bank of America, especially because the cardholder agreement held customers liable for all charges, even those from fraud. BofA officially lost over $8.8 million on the launch, but including advertising and overhead, the actual loss was probably around $20 million. After Williams and some of his closest associates left, BofA management realized that BankAmericard could still be salvaged.