Visa Inc.

Visa Inc. is an American multinational corporation based in San Francisco, California, that specializes in payment card services. Its primary function is enabling electronic funds transfers around the world, mainly through Visa-branded credit, debit, and prepaid cards. The company itself does not issue cards, extend credit, or set consumer rates and fees. Instead, it supplies financial institutions with Visa-branded payment products, which those institutions then use to offer their customers credit, debit, prepaid, and cash access programs.

In 2025, Visa’s global network, known as VisaNet, handled 257.5 billion transactions totaling $14.2 trillion. Nearly all Visa transactions are processed through VisaNet at one of four secure data centers located in Ashburn, Virginia; Highlands Ranch, Colorado; London, England; and Singapore. These facilities are heavily fortified against natural disasters, crime, and terrorism. They can operate independently of one another and of external utilities if needed, and they are capable of handling up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations per second.

Visa was founded in 1958 by Bank of America as the BankAmericard credit card program. To compete with Master Charge (now Mastercard), Bank of America began licensing the BankAmericard program to other financial institutions in 1966. Tensions grew over Bank of America’s licensing outside its own network, leading Dee Hock—who had joined in 1968 to manage the card’s rollout in the Pacific Northwest—to convince the bank that BankAmericard could succeed as an independent operation. By 1970, Bank of America placed control of the program with the card-issuing banks, which established National BankAmericard with Hock as president and CEO. That entity was renamed Visa in 1976.

Visa is the world’s second-largest card payment organization (debit and credit cards combined) by annual value of card payments and number of issued cards, after being surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015. However, because UnionPay’s size is largely due to its domestic market in China, Visa remains the dominant bankcard company in the rest of the world, commanding a 50% market share of total card payments.

The history of Visa begins on September 18, 1958, when Bank of America launched its BankAmericard credit card program in Fresno, California. In the weeks before the launch, Bank of America saturated Fresno mailboxes with an initial mass mailing of 65,000 unsolicited credit cards—actual working cards, not applications. The program was the idea of Bank of America’s in-house product development group, the Customer Services Research Group, led by Joseph P. Williams. Williams convinced senior executives in 1956 to let him pursue what became the world’s first successful mass mailing of unsolicited credit cards to a large population.

Williams’ achievement was not inventing the all-purpose credit card—by the mid-1950s, middle-class Americans already had revolving credit accounts with multiple merchants, and the need for a unified financial instrument was clear. There were charge cards like Diners Club, and at least a dozen earlier attempts at an all-purpose card had failed, mostly because small banks lacked the resources. Williams and his team studied those failures, as well as successful revolving credit operations at Sears and Mobil Oil. Fresno was chosen for its population of 250,000 (large enough to support a card program but small enough to control startup costs), Bank of America’s 45% market share there, and its relative isolation, which limited 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 Bank of America panicked when it learned that another bank was about to launch its own card drop in San Francisco, the bank’s home market. By March 1959, drops began in San Francisco and Sacramento; by June, cards were being dropped in Los Angeles; and by October, over 2 million credit cards had been distributed across California, with 20,000 merchants accepting BankAmericard. However, the program was plagued with problems. Williams, who had never worked in a bank’s loan department, had been too trusting in customers’ honesty, 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 criticized Bank of America, especially after it was revealed that the cardholder agreement held customers liable for all charges, including those from fraud. Bank of America officially lost over $8.8 million on the launch, though the full cost of advertising and other expenses was higher.