Visa

In nineteen fifty eight, Bank of America mailed sixty thousand credit cards to people in Fresno who never asked for them. Five hundred dollar limits, already activated, sitting in mailboxes next to electricity bills. No merchant had a terminal. No customer had a habit. It was a cold start into nothing. Bank of America lost money on every single transaction for two years. The losses were the point. No merchant installs a card reader when zero customers carry cards. No customer carries a card accepted nowhere. Both sides wait for the other to move first, so neither moves. Bank of America broke the deadlock by absorbing the pain upfront. Fraud ran rampant. Delinquencies hit twenty two percent. But merchants started accepting the cards. Once merchants accepted, customers used. Once customers used, more merchants joined. By nineteen seventy six the network renamed itself Visa and built the toll booth: zero point thirteen to zero point fifteen percent on every transaction, plus interchange fees of one point five to three point five percent split with issuing banks.