IMGCAP(1)]
Visa Inc. marked yesterday as the 50th anniversary of the day Bank of America Corp. issued the first BankAmericard credit card, the brand that would become Visa. Several sources interviewed by CardLine sister publication Cards&Payments cite the ideas and philosophies of former Visa CEO Dee Hock as important to the future of Visa in particular and the payments industry in general. In 1970, when BofA spun off its card into National BankAmericard Inc., Hock became the new company's first CEO. He pushed for National BankAmericard to become a decentralized, collaborative, nonstock, member-owned company of card-issuing financial institutions. Hock's philosophy, which he later dubbed "chaordic," for chaos and order, applies chaos theory and a bit of anarcho-syndicalist philosophy to business, nonprofit organizations and other assemblies of individual minds. Fran Schall, now head of sales operations at Visa Inc., joined National BankAmericard in 1975. She found Hock an intimidating presence. "He was very demanding and very intense. There were lots of meetings, and he expected people would be on their game all the time," Schall says. "He expected that as ideas would surface, he would push back and challenge ideas, and the solid ones would rise to the top." Hock welcomed proposals from anyone, regardless of their position in National BankAmericard, Schall says. "I was pretty young then, but any good idea I was able to put together justification for got the go." From the start, Hock pushed the idea of computerized transactions driving universal currency to enable payments from one's assets or lines of credit anywhere in the world. "Hock had this concept that BankAmericard had the potential to be what he called 'digital currency,'" Schall says. "His dream was that it wouldn't matter what kind of a bank account a customer had. A customer with a plastic card would access an account and know which (type of) account was being accessed."
