Visa Inc. (V)

Visa Inc. is an American transnational financial company that provides infrastructure for accepting and servicing card payments, as well as the VISA brand used by banks for issuing plastic cards. An international payment system, VISA offers its clients secure access to express payments. The company’s transactions are processed via VisaNet in two independent facilities, Operations Center East (Virginia) and Operations Center Central (Colorado). Each of them is effectively protected, and they can operate independently from one another and external utilities to process up to 30,000 transactions simultaneously, and perform up to 100 billion computations every second. The annual volume of VISA cards is about $5 trillion.
 
 The history of Visa Inc. goes back to 1958, when an American bank named BofA launched BankAmericard in California. At that time, it was not the first attempt to launch credit cards, which were in demand from the middle class, and this demand was supported by recurrent credit accounts. As the system was ineffective and inconvenient, clients had to carry several different cards to pay their bills. The launch of BankAmericard was successful, but owing to the blooming fraud that followed, BofA was criticised for the low-security level of the product. At the end of the 1960s, following numerous apologies from the bank and several improvements to the product, BankAmericard finally worked effectively, which resulted in BofA granting licences to the card also outside the US. In 1976, BankAmericard and its licencees from other countries teamed up under a new name, Visa.