The moment of maximum pressure

Listening to the Acquired podcast about the history of Visa now, fascinating story both in its unfolding and its telling. But for a dork like me, the most compelling moment was the 1968 processing crisis for Visa's predecessor entity BankAmericard that brought all the issuing banks of the time together and ultimately gave rise to Visa. Back then, authentication of charges were done manually. If you were trying to charge something that was above the "floor limit" for the card, often $50, the salesperson would have to call the store's bank to check the customer's remaining credit limit. Then the store's bank would call the purchaser's bank and speak to a person there. It could take minutes. Obviously this constrained growth.

In 1968 all the banks that were using BankAmericard -- then a licensed product of Bank of America -- got together to talk through approaches in some boring place, maybe Columbus, Ohio. The solution that emerged (I'll spare you the details -- listen to the podcast) became Visa.

What's most intriguing here is that all this coincided precisely with the "paperwork crisis" on Wall Street which closed markets for months at a time and gave rise to an analog to Visa in the capital markets -- the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation -- much less a household name but similarly important in terms of providing a shared standard for data transmission and payment exchange for securities trades. Nb. and fun fact the DTCC was helmed by the father of a Larchmont neighbor of Mary's and the father of a friend of the Berridge family.   

It seems likely not entirely coincidental that all this came to a head in 1968, not just the great year of social upheaval in the streets of Chicago, Paris, and also the Mexico City Olympics but also the year the first cohort of Boomers turned 22 and headed out into the working world. There was just too much growth, too much commerce. It was also the year Intel spun out of Fairchild Semiconductor as the world began to spin up ever more computing power, which would be key to facilitating the liberation of commerce from the shackles of paper, with all its attendant goods and ills.