Finance History|Bank of Italy Building, Fresno — The BankAmericard Drop

People treat the general-purpose credit card as a New York or San Francisco invention. The first mass drop of a bank card that revolved was mailed from this city. On 18 September 1958, Bank of America sent unsolicited BankAmericards to Fresno addresses. Later published counts put the first mailing at about 60,000 cards. Credit limits on those cards were set in a band of $300 to $500 in 1958 dollars. More than 300 local merchants had already agreed to take the card. Fresno was chosen because it was large enough to matter, isolated enough to contain a failure, and already a Bank of America town: period accounts say about 45 percent of local families banked there. The product came out of the bank's Customer Services Research Department under Joseph P. Williams. Charge plates and Diners Club already existed. What was new was a bank issuing a revolving line that many merchants would honor, without a fresh loan application at the window. The first months were messy: fraud, nonpayment, and a later nationwide ban on unsolicited cards. The brand survived. BankAmericard was licensed beyond California and renamed Visa in 1976. Visa Inc. is now an S&P 500 payments firm. Bank of America, which started the drop, remains in the same index. The Renaissance Revival tower at Fulton and Tulare, opened in 1918 for A. P. Giannini's Bank of Italy, was still the Fresno headquarters in 1958. The bank moved a block away in 1968. The old palace has stood vacant for decades and is on the National Register. The sidewalk is the right place to stand. The cards themselves went out through the mail. Photo: Bobak Ha'Eri, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.