Short answers, pulled from the story.
Visa was founded on the 18th of September 1958 by Bank of America as the BankAmericard credit card program, launched in Fresno, California. It was renamed Visa in 1976, with the new name conceived by the company's founder Dee Hock, who believed the word was instantly recognizable in many languages and denoted universal acceptance.
Joseph P. Williams, leader of Bank of America's Customer Services Research Group, persuaded senior executives in 1956 to pursue the world's first mass mailing of actual unsolicited credit cards. The launch nearly failed because 22% of accounts went delinquent against an expected 4%, credit card fraud became a new category of crime, and BofA lost officially over $8.8 million, with the true figure likely around $20 million when advertising and overhead were included. Williams resigned in December 1959.
VisaNet is Visa's directly operated global payment processing network, running through four secure data centers in Ashburn, Virginia; Highlands Ranch, Colorado; London; and Singapore. In 2025, VisaNet processed 257.5 billion transactions worth US$14.2 trillion. Each facility can handle up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations per second.
Visa's IPO took place on the 18th of March 2008. The company sold 406 million shares at $44 per share, raising $17.9 billion, which was at the time the largest initial public offering in U.S. history. After underwriters exercised their overallotment option, the total share count reached 446.6 million and total proceeds reached $19.1 billion.
Visa announced a $5.3 billion agreement to acquire Plaid in January 2020, but the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit in November 2020 to block the deal, arguing Visa was a monopolist trying to eliminate a competitive threat. Visa CEO Alfred Kelly had described the acquisition as an "insurance policy" against a threat to Visa's debit business. Visa and Plaid mutually agreed to abandon the transaction in January 2021.
Visa is the world's second-largest card payment organization by annual value of payments and number of issued cards, having been surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015. However, because UnionPay's scale is driven primarily by China's domestic market, Visa remains the dominant card company in the rest of the world, commanding approximately 50% of total card payments outside China.