The history of Visa, MasterCard and Highlight debit cards

Pre-paid cards, debit cards, credit cards, visa purchasing card, all of these are terms we replace everyday with the shorter terms “Visa” or “Master”. This is because the two most well-known and widespread payment cards companies in the world are Visa and MasterCard.

Visa

Established in 1958 when the Bank of America launched their new product “BankAmericard”, a credit card for the middle class and small to medium businesses in the United States. In a short time, the company went international and introduced its first ATM card in 1975. The next year they decided to rebrand and chose a unified name that was easy to pronounce in every language and thus “Visa” was born.

Mastercard used to be known as “Interbank” in 1966 and was made up of a consortium of banks in California.

MasterCard

It started as a consortium of regional banks as a response to Bank of America’s “BankAmericard”. Established in 1966 by the Interbank Card Association or ICA consortium in California; MasterCard was originally known as “Interbank”. In 1968 Interbank made a deal with Eurocard in Europe that allowed them to access the European market and vice versa. They rebranded in 1969 to Master Charge and then once more in 1979 to be today’s Mastercard.

Check out the history of credit cards here.

How did debit cards come into being?

In the beginning when customers wanted to make a withdrawal they had to go to the bank in person. Can you imagine how busy the banks were? Or how long the lines were?!!

Even when banks started having specific cashier windows for withdrawals and deposits it still did not solve the problem completely until the first ATM machine was created. Invented by American entrepreneur Luther Simjian in 1960 the first ATM only collected cheques and deposits and was only used by Citi Bank. Unfortunately, Citibank felt the ATM would not catch on and canceled the venture. Few years later Scottish inventor John Shepherd-Baron reintroduced the idea of an ATM and marketed it using the notion that you can do your banking transactions even on holidays or after the bank closes. These ATMs used paper slips written in radioactive ink so that the machines could read them. Finally in 1969 American businessman Donald Wetzel introduced the first ATM to use plastic cards like we use today.

Explore the history of ATMs here.