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[Music] in the 1950s Bank of America discovered a problem most American households maintain some kind of revolving credit accounts with several different merchants but these separate accounts were inconvenient there were also charge cards out there but they often had one use like diners club was mainly for restaurants there was no general-purpose credit card some smaller banks had tried but failed so in September 1958 Bank of America launched BankAmericard the world's first credit card in Fresno California but instead of just advertising the card and having people sign up they mailed out 60,000 working credit cards to the public what could go wrong right well they considered that too that's why they picked Fresno a city with a big enough population to make it work but isolated enough that they could control the public relations fallout if the idea went wrong initial indicators were good and competition from other banks caused Bank of America to quickly expand across California however losses mounted up the launch alone lost Bank of America over 8 million dollars worth about seventy million dollars today by late to 1959 22 percent of accounts were delinquent and fraud was rampant this didn't deter the bank however the original manager of the project who had resigned because of the perceived failure had never actually worked in the bank's loan department so Bank of America management came in and cleared things up they imposed stricter financial controls apologized in letters to three million households across California for the fraud that taken place and you think they would have stopped mailing random people working credit cards but they didn't that continued until it was outlawed by the government in 1970 by the mid sixties a Bank of America started to license their credit card system to banks outside of California they also expanded internationally with BankAmericard being issued in the UK by Barclays for example by the 1970s over 100 million cards were in circulation but BankAmericard had competition from mastercharge that would later become MasterCard Diners Club an American Express the transformation of BankAmericard into Visa starts with a man de hoc he was the manager at the National Bank of Commerce at this point Bank of America license out the BankAmericard system to different banks across the country but it had been done in an ad hoc fashion and there were issues with interchange between banks and there was also the issue of having cars using the branding of Bank of America potentially a rival to some banks who issued the cart so mr. Hawke suggested to the banks that they set up a committee to look at this hoc headed up this committee and somehow managed to persuade Bank of America to give up the BankAmericard program forming it into National Bank America incorporated an independent corporation with hot as the CEO in 1970 by 1974 a similar thing happened with the International versions of Bank America and the international bank card company...