Visa Inc.

Visa Inc. () is an American multinational payment card services corporation headquartered in San Francisco, California. It facilitates electronic funds transfers worldwide, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards, debit cards and prepaid cards. 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 2025, Visa's global network (known as VisaNet) processed 257.5 billion transactions worth US$14.2 trillion. Visa was founded in 1958 by Bank of America (BofA) as the BankAmericard credit card program. In response to competitor Master Charge (now Mastercard), BofA began to license the BankAmericard program to other financial institutions in 1966. Growing friction over BofA's licensing of the program outside its own network led Dee Hock, who had joined to manage the card's Pacific Northwest rollout in 1968, to persuade the bank that BankAmericard could succeed as an independent operation. By 1970, BofA had placed control of the program with card issuer banks, who established National BankAmericard with Hock as president and CEO. National BankAmericard was then renamed Visa in 1976. Nearly all Visa transactions worldwide are processed through the company's directly operated VisaNet at one of four secure data centers, located in Ashburn, Virginia, and Highlands Ranch, Colorado, in the United States; London, England; and in Singapore. These facilities 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. Visa is the world's second-largest card payment organization (debit and credit cards combined), after being surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015, based on annual value of card payments transacted and...