Finance History | Visa — The Fresno Drop on Fulton Street

People treat Visa as a San Francisco network that appeared already named, with a hologram on the card.

The first mass mailing that made the card work was here, in Fresno, on 18 September 1958. Bank of America posted about 60,000 unsolicited BankAmericards, with limits of three to five hundred dollars, to households in a city of a quarter of a million where the bank already held nearly half the deposit accounts.

Joseph P. Williams ran the experiment from the bank's customer-services research group. From March that year local officers had signed some three hundred Fresno merchants. Florsheim Shoes in the Helm Building on Fulton Street was the first chain store to take the card. Shoppers stood in the doorway to watch other people charge goods.

Diners Club and American Express were charge cards that had to be paid in thirty days. BankAmericard was revolving credit that could be used at more than one counter. Fraud and unpaid balances nearly killed the programme. Williams resigned in December 1959. The bank kept the product, licensed it out of state in 1966, and renamed it Visa in 1976.

The present Visa campus is not the origin. The origin was a mail drop onto Fresno, and a shoe shop on Fulton Street where people first watched a stranger buy something on a bank card.