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There is something that I've never managed to put my finger on: most companies as huge as Google / Apple / FB etc... or even more traditional ones (banks, oil,

There is something that I've never managed to put my finger on: most companies as huge as Google / Apple / FB etc... or even more traditional ones (banks, oil, etc ...) are sort of "well known" in the sense that they do PR, they have well known figureheads, etc ... VISA has always struck me as a very nebulous entity, whose structure, governance, is not very well know by the general public. I wonder how they managed to grow so large while managing to keep such a conspicuously low profile. edit: and to answer my own question, the wikipedia page is quite informative : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.

xfour 6y ago
I think they were an "association" until the spun out into a company in their own right recently. https://money.cnn.com/2008/03/21/news/companies/visabanks/index.htm?dlbk https://money.cnn.com/2008/03/21/news/companies/visabanks/in...
thoraway1010 6y ago
If you make $10B/year on revenue of $20B/year (great margin at that scale) you keep quiet I think for good reason :)
ryanwatkins 6y ago
Their leaders may not be well known, but they spend an absolutely massive amount of money promoting their brands. They are extremely recognizable. Mastercard so much so that the recently removed their name from their logo as its nolonger needed.
redis_mlc 6y ago
If you don't work in the payments space, then there's a lot of entities that you're not aware of since their members/associates front them. One fintech startup recently sold for $5 billion to VISA. They issused a PR statement that was completely false, but if you didn't work in payments you'd never know they didn't have 11,000+ clients (hint: that's the number of institutions in NACHA.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACHA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACHA

xfour 6y ago

I think they were an "association" until the spun out into a company in their own right recently. https://money.cnn.com/2008/03/21/news/companies/visabanks/index.htm?dlbk https://money.cnn.com/2008/03/21/news/companies/visabanks/in...

thoraway1010 6y ago

If you make $10B/year on revenue of $20B/year (great margin at that scale) you keep quiet I think for good reason :)

ryanwatkins 6y ago

Their leaders may not be well known, but they spend an absolutely massive amount of money promoting their brands. They are extremely recognizable. Mastercard so much so that the recently removed their name from their logo as its nolonger needed.

redis_mlc 6y ago

If you don't work in the payments space, then there's a lot of entities that you're not aware of since their members/associates front them. One fintech startup recently sold for $5 billion to VISA. They issused a PR statement that was completely false, but if you didn't work in payments you'd never know they didn't have 11,000+ clients (hint: that's the number of institutions in NACHA.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACH_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACHA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NACHA