What is a Visa credit card?
Sometimes you’ll see “Visa” written as a name, and other times you see it in all capital letters: “VISA.” The difference is, the all-caps version stands for Visa International Service Association. Either usage refers to the multinational credit card corporation based out of San Francisco. Visa credit cardshave the largest electronic retail payment network in the world. Visa manages payments coming from all types of customers: merchants, businesses, governments, financial institutions, and of course, consumers. Visa captured 48% of the debit card market and 44% of the credit card market in the U.S. in 2006. For those old enough to remember 1970s America, you may remember when Visa was called “BankAmericard.” That card started in 1958, when Bank of America sent out 60,000 unsolicited credit cards – not applications, but actual working credit cards. It was a huge success, at least at first. Credit cards themselves weren’t all that new, it’s just that Americans tended to have credit accoun
