Visa credit card
You have surely heard the name of Visa credit card, one of the most acclaimed and popular credit cards in the global arena. The credit card was brought to the fore by Visa Inc., usually referred as VISA (Visa International Service Association). It is a multinational corporation based in San Francisco, California, USA and the company is reputed for operating the world’s largest retail electronic payment network along with several other activities. These include management of payments among financial institutions, merchants, consumers, businesses and government entities.
Prior to Visa Inc’s IPO in the first part of 2008, it was operated in the form of a cooperative of some 21,000 financial institutions, engaged with issuing and marketing Visa products including credit and debit cards.
It should be remembered that Visa deals with payments that do come from all forms of customers like merchants, businesses, governments, financial institutions, and certainly consumers. Only in the year 2006, Visa captured 48% of the debit card market and 44% of the credit card market in the domain of the USA.
You can have a chat with the old-timers and they will definitely say Visa was called “BankAmericard” in the decade of 1970s. The concept of the credit card did commence in1958 at the behest of the bank, especially when Bank of America sent out 60,000 spontaneous credit cards. The endeavor ended with a great success, without a shred of doubt. Nevertheless, in the subsequent years some sordid facts did come to the fore. A huger number of accounts became felonious, and the new crime of “credit card fraud” not only gained a foothold but was found to reign supreme also.
But that proved to be futile in deterring the bank and a multinational corporation called IBANCO was set up exclusively to deal with the international BankAmericard revolving credit program. It took place n 1974 and the forward march has been going since then. Well, it was the year 1976 when BankAmericard changed its name to Visa.