uses see visa disambiguation . visa inc. visa inc. headquarters at metro center in foster city type public traded as nyse v dow jones industrial average component s & p 500 component industry financial services founded 1958 ; 58 years ago 1958 as bankamericard fresno california united states founder dee hock headquarters foster city 1 california united states area served worldwide key people joseph saunders executive chairman charles scharf ceo products credit cards payment systems revenue us 13.88 billion 2015 2 operating income us 9.06 billion 2015 2 net income us 6.32 billion 2015 2 total assets us 40.23 billion 2015 2 total equity us 29.84 billion 2015 2 number of employees 11 300 2015 2 website visa.com visa inc. vi z or vi s also known as visa stylized as visa is an american multinational financial services corporation headquartered in foster city california united states . 3 it facilitates electronic funds transfers throughout the world most commonly through visa branded credit cards and debit cards . 4 visa does not issue cards extend credit or set rates and fees for consumers ; rather visa provides financial institutions with visa branded payment products that they then use to offer credit debit prepaid and cash access programs to their customers . in 2015 the nilson report a publication that tracks the credit card industry found that visa s global network known as visanet processed 100 billion transactions with a total volume of us 6.8 trillion . visa has operations across all continents worldwide with the exception of antarctica . visa europe is a separate membership entity that is an exclusive licensee of visa inc. s trademarks and technology in the european region issuing cards such as visa debit and visa credit . nearly all visa transactions worldwide are processed through visanet at one of two secure facilities operations center east located somewhere near ashburn virginia ; and operations center central located somewhere near highlands ranch colorado . both data centers are heavily secured against natural disasters crime and terrorism ; can operate independently of each other and from external utilities if necessary ; and can handle up to 30 000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations every second . every transaction is checked past 500 variables including 100 fraud detection parameters such as the location and spending habits of the customer and the merchant s location before being accepted . 5 6 contents 1 history 1.1 corporate structure 1.2 billing & finance charge methods 1.3 ipo and restructuring 1.4 visa europe 2 criticism and controversy 2.1 sanctions of russia 2.2 wikileaks 2.3 litigation and regulatory actions 2.3.1 anti trust lawsuit by atm operators 2.3.2 debit card swipe fees 2.3.3 u.s. justice department actions 2.3.4 anti trust issues in europe 2.3.5 payment card interchange fee and merchant discount antitrust litigation 2.4 high swipe fees in poland 2.5 confrontation with wal mart over high fees 3 corporate affairs 3.1 headquarters 4 operations 4.1 operating regulations 5 paywave 6 visa checkout 7 trademark and design 7.1 logo design 7.2 card design 8 sponsorships 8.1 olympics and paralympics 8.2 others 9 see also 10 references 11 external links history edit a 1976 ad promoting the change of name to visa . note the early visa card shown in the ad as well as the image of the bankamericard that it replaced . in mid september 1958 bank of america bofa launched its bankamericard credit card program in fresno california with an initial mass mailing or drop as they came to be called of 60 000 unsolicited credit cards . 7 the original idea was the brainchild of bofa s in house product development think tank the customer services research group and its leader 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 mere applications to a large population . 8 williams pioneering accomplishment was that he brought about the successful implementation of the all purpose credit card in the sense that his project was not cancelled outright not in coming up with the idea . 9 by the mid 1950s the typical middle class american already maintained revolving credit accounts with several different merchants which was clearly inefficient and inconvenient due to the need to carry so many cards and pay so many separate bills each month . 10 the need for a unified financial instrument was already evident to the american financial services industry but no one could figure out how to do it . there were already charge cards like diners club which had to be paid in full at the end of each billing cycle and by the mid 1950s there had been at least a dozen attempts to create an all purpose credit card . 10 however these prior attempts had been carried out by small banks which lacked the resources to make them work . 10 williams and his team studied these failures carefully and believed they could avoid replicating those banks mistakes ; they also studied existing revolving credit operations at sears and mobil oil to learn why they were successful . 11 fresno was selected for its population of 250 000 big enough to make a credit card work small enough to control initial startup cost bofa s market share of that population 45 % and relative isolation to control public relations damage in case the project failed . 12 visa logo used from july 1 1992 to 2000 visa logo used from 1998 to 2006 visa logo used from 2005 to 2014 visa logo used in 2014 visa acceptance logo from 2015 the 1958 test at first went smoothly but then bofa panicked when it confirmed rumors that another bank was about to initiate its own drop in san francisco bofa s home market . 13 by march 1959 drops began in san francisco and sacramento ; by june bofa was dropping cards in los angeles ; by october the entire state had been saturated with over 2 million credit cards and bankamericard was being accepted by 20 000 merchants . 14 however the program was riddled with problems as williams who had never worked in a bank s loan department had been too earnest and trusting in his belief in the basic goodness of the bank s customers and he resigned in december 1959 . 15 22 % of accounts were delinquent not the 4 % expected and police departments around the state were confronted by numerous incidents of the brand new crime of credit card fraud . 16 both politicians and journalists joined the general uproar against bank of america and its newfangled credit card especially when it was pointed out that the cardholder agreement held customers liable for all charges even those resulting from fraud . 17 bofa officially lost over 8.8 million on the launch of bankamericard but when the full cost of advertising and overhead was included the bank s actual loss was probably around 20 million . 17 however after williams and some of his closest associates left bofa management realized that bankamericard was salvageable . 18 they conducted a massive effort to clean up after williams imposed proper financial controls published an open letter to 3 million households across the state apologizing for the credit card fraud and other issues their card raised and eventually were able to make the new financial instrument work . 19 the original goal of bofa was to offer the bankamericard product across california but in 1966 bofa began to sign licensing agreements with a group of banks outside of california in response to a new competitor master charge now mastercard which had been created by an alliance of several other california banks to compete against bankamericard . bofa itself like all other u.s. banks at the time could not expand directly into other states due to federal restrictions not repealed until 1994 . over the following 11 years various banks licensed the card system from bank of america thus forming a network of banks backing the bankamericard system across the united states . 20 the drops of unsolicited credit cards continued unabated thanks to bofa and its licensees and competitors until they were outlawed in 1970 21 due to the serious financial chaos they caused but not before over 100 million credit cards had been distributed into the american population . 22 during the late 1960s bofa also licensed the bankamericard program to banks in several other countries which began issuing cards with localized brand names . for example citation needed in canada an alliance of banks including toronto dominion bank canadian imperial bank of commerce royal bank of canada banque canadienne nationale and bank of nova scotia issued credit cards under the chargex name from 1968 to 1977 . in france it was known as carte bleue blue card . the logo still appears on many french issued visa cards today . in japan the sumitomo bank issued bankamericards through the sumitomo credit service . in the uk the only bankamericard issuer for some years was barclaycard . the branding still exists today but is used not only on visa cards issued by barclays but on its mastercard and american express cards as well . 23 in 1968 a manager at the national bank of commerce later rainier bancorp dee hock was asked to supervise that bank s launch of its own licensed version of bankamericard in the pacific northwest market . although bank of america had cultivated the public image that bankamericard s troubled startup issues were now safely in the past hock realized that the bankamericard licensee program itself was in terrible disarray because it had developed and grown very rapidly in an ad hoc fashion . for example interchange transaction issues between banks were becoming a very serious problem which had not been seen before when bank of america was the sole issuer of bankamericards . hock suggested to other licensees that they form a committee to investigate and analyze the various problems with the licensee program ; they promptly made him the chair of that committee . in june 1970 bank of america gave up control of the bankamericard program . the various bankamericard issuer banks took control of the program creating national bankamericard inc. nbi an independent delaware corporation which would be in charge of managing promoting and developing the bankamericard system within the united states . in other words bankamericard was transformed from a franchising system into a jointly controlled consortium or alliance like its competitor master charge . hock became nbi s first president and ceo . however bank of america retained the right to directly license bankamericard to banks outside of the united states and continued to issue and support such licenses . by 1972 licenses had been granted in 15 countries . the international licensees soon encountered a variety of problems with their licensing programs and they hired hock as a consultant to help them restructure their relationship with bofa as he had done for the domestic licensees . as a result in 1974 the international bankcard company ibanco a multinational member corporation was founded in order to manage the international bankamericard program . 24 citation needed sample barclaycard left as issued in the uk in the 1960s 70s . co branded cards were also issued by affiliates such as the co operative bank and yorkshire bank . the chargex logo right used in canada . in 1976 the directors of ibanco determined that bringing the various international networks together into a single network with a single name internationally would be in the best interests of the corporation ; however in many countries there was still great reluctance to issue a card associated with bank of america even though the association was entirely nominal in nature . for this reason in 1976 bankamericard barclaycard carte bleue chargex sumitomo card