Finance History | 1001 Fulton Street, Fresno — Sixty Thousand Cards With No Application

People treat Visa as a San Francisco network that always cleared cards in milliseconds.

The first mass mailing went out from a Bank of America book in Fresno.

On 18 September 1958 the bank posted BankAmericard to about 60,000 households in a city of roughly 250,000. There was no application. Limits ran from $300 to $500.

Joseph P. Williams, who ran Bank of America's Customer Services Research Department, had picked Fresno because the bank already held about 45 percent of the local deposit market and because the city was isolated enough that a failure would stay local.

More than 300 Fresno merchants had been signed in the months before the drop. Florsheim Shoes, in the Helm Building on Fulton Street, was the first chain store to take the card.

The Bank of Italy building at 1001 Fulton Street, opened in 1918 and later the Bank of America Fresno headquarters, was the branch that carried the experiment.

Losses followed. Fraud, unpaid balances, and merchant resistance produced a loss on the order of $20 million in 1958 dollars before controls tightened. Williams left before the statewide rollout finished.

By 1961 the program showed a profit of $179,000. National licensing began in 1966. The BankAmericard name was dropped in 1976 for Visa, a word that would clear in more than one language.

The revolving bank card, as distinct from a 30-day charge plate, started as unsolicited plastic in a Central Valley mailbox.

Photo: Bank of Italy Building, Fresno, Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.