The Making Of Visa Credit Card And Its Protocol

Posted by Nick Niesen on October 29th, 2010

There are different brands of credit cards in the market today. One popular brand is the Visa credit card. However, there are also visa cards that are offered as a debit card, this is a different matter altogether. It is the shortened name of the company VISA or Visa International Service Association based in San Francisco, California. It is a joint economic venture of twenty one thousand financial institutions. They are issuing and marketing Visa products.

The launching of the visa card happened in 1976. It was named after BankAmericacard. The Bank of America is the issuer of BankAmericacard which also have other international names. It was before the Visa brand introduction. In fact, Visa cards also incorporated the motif of the BankAmericacard in their designs. The gold and blue logos of Visa cards represent the golden color of California hills and the blue color of the sky.

The alliance of various banks in Canada such as Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of Nova, Royal Bank of Canada, and Toronto-Dominion Bank issued Visa cards in the name of Chargex. French Visa which is currently issued is still using the BankAmericacard logo. It was called Carte Bleue in France which means blue card. The only issuer of BankAmericacard in United Kingdom was Barclaycard.

There are three types of Visa cards. The debit cards which is paid through a savings or checking accounts. The Credit cards which is paid monthly with appropriate interest's rates. The prepaid cards which is paid through cash accounts and without check writing privileges.

There are two protocols that were developed to standardize consumer services. Visa International Association created the debit and credit protocols basing from the type of Visa cards they marketed.

Visa Credit cards uses credit protocols. The cards can be used at banking centers or POS (point-of-sale terminal) after showing the Visa logo. It contains the signature of the card holder for identification. Credit protocol may be utilized by Visa card holders even if it is being marketed as prepaid cards or debit cards. The reason is the imprinted Visa logo on the card's front surface.

The users are sometimes confused by the word credit and debit. Well, the words do not necessarily depend on what the dictionary said about it. It is because debit card may still be used for credit transactions. In this case, misnomer occurs that credit cards are only used for loans while debit protocols are used for checking accounts only. The banks actually select several backend methods to handle the accounts. They make "debit" as the generic synonym of Plus/interlink, while "credit" as the generic synonym of Visa and other cards having similar systems including American Express, MasterCard, and Discover Card.

The associations include the following rules regarding the development of Visa Credit cards.

-For security purposes upon every transactions. The cardholders are identified through their signatures upon using their Visa credit cards.

-It will explain how a bank denies a transaction and how cooperation takes place in a bank to prevent fraud.

-It will ensure a standard protection from fraud and false identification that are not discriminatory.

The founder of the VISA Company, Dee Hock believed that using the word Visa will be recognized instantly in various languages and countries. Besides, it also denotes universal acceptance. However, the consumers must know the rules to avoid conflicts in end when using their Visa Credit cards.