50 Fun Facts About Credit Cards

In which year did Diners Club produce the first general-purpose charge card?

Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara wanted one card that many merchants would accept, and it had to be paid in full each month.

Per company legend, what did Frank McNamara forget at a restaurant in 1949, inspiring Diners Club?

Diners Club calls his return visit the following February "The First Supper", though its own press agent later said the story was invented.

How many participating restaurants did Diners Club list when its card was first introduced?

About 200 of the founders' friends and acquaintances were the first cardholders.

In which year did Diners Club introduce its first plastic card?

Early cards were cardboard; by the mid-1960s the club had 1.3 million members.

In which California city did Bank of America launch BankAmericard in 1958?

The bank chose it because 45% of residents were customers and its isolation would limit the damage if the test flopped.

Roughly how many unsolicited cards did Bank of America mail out in its initial 1958 "drop"?

By October 1959 the whole of California had been saturated with more than 2 million cards.

How much did Bank of America officially lose on the launch of BankAmericard?

Including advertising and overhead the true loss was probably nearer $20 million, yet the card was in profit by May 1961.

In which year did the BankAmericard licensees unify under the name Visa?

Barclaycard, Carte Bleue, Chargex and Sumitomo Card all adopted the new name, keeping the blue, white and gold flag.

Who was Visa's first CEO, the man who also coined its name?

He had joined in 1968 to run BankAmericard's Pacific Northwest rollout and computerised the system in 1973.

What was Mastercard called when a group of banks created it in 1966 to compete with BankAmericard?

Citibank's Everything Card was merged into it in 1969, and the name became MasterCard in 1979.

The two overlapping circles of the Mastercard logo came from which regional banking group?

The "Master Charge" name itself was coined by the First National Bank of Louisville, Kentucky.

In which New York town is Mastercard headquartered?

The company has been publicly traded since 2006; before that it was a cooperative owned by more than 25,000 financial institutions.

What is Mastercard's long-running advertising tagline?

The campaign has been applied to both its credit and debit products.

American Express was founded in 1850 in Buffalo, New York, as what kind of business?

Two of its founders, Henry Wells and William Fargo, went on to start Wells Fargo in 1852.

In which year did American Express issue its first charge card?

That first card was paper; the gold card followed in 1966, green in 1969 and platinum in 1984.

What is the invitation-only American Express card launched in 1999, nicknamed the 'black card'?

Amex's other famous marketing line, "Don't Leave Home Without It", dates from 1975.

Which retailer introduced the Discover card in 1985?

It was the first credit card with no annual fee, and its credit manager Ray Kennedy Sr. conceived it.

What was the value of the first trial Discover transaction, at an Atlanta Sears in September 1985?

Discover later became the first card to offer a "Cashback Bonus" on purchases.

Which was the first credit card issued outside the United States, launched in 1966?

It began as a charge card and became a true revolving credit card in November 1967 once the Bank of England agreed.

What was the Charga-Plate, used in US stores from the 1930s to the late 1950s?

Farrington Manufacturing developed it in 1928, and some stores kept the plates in their own files rather than giving them to customers.

Which airline helped create the Air Travel Card in 1934, letting passengers buy now and pay later?

Cardholders got a 15% discount, and by 1941 about half of airline revenues came through the scheme.

In which year were unsolicited mass mailings of credit cards outlawed in the United States?

By then roughly 100 million cards had been dropped on the public, including, Life magazine complained, on drunks and compulsive debtors.

Which 1888 utopian novel by Edward Bellamy describes a concept it calls credit cards?

Bellamy's cards actually work more like modern debit cards, drawing on a citizen's share of national output.

How does a charge card differ from a credit card?

Credit cards let the holder carry a revolving balance and pay interest on it.

What are the standard dimensions of a credit card under the ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 standard?

ATM and debit cards share the same format, with corners rounded to a radius of about 3 mm.

What does the final numeral of a payment card number represent?

The formula, devised by IBM scientist Hans Peter Luhn, catches mistyped numbers but is not a security measure.

What do the first six or eight digits of a card number identify?

This issuer identification number, or BIN, starts with a major industry identifier digit.

How many digits can a payment card number have?

Most Visa cards use 16, but some old ranges still use 13.

Which scientist created the "mod 10" check-digit formula used by most credit card numbers?

He worked at IBM, and the algorithm is now in the public domain and specified in ISO/IEC 7812-1.

Where is the security number printed on an American Express card?

Visa, Mastercard and Discover put a three-digit code on the back, to the right of the signature box.

An employee of which company invented the card security code in the UK in 1995?

Michael Stone's original version was an eleven-character alphanumeric code before APACS trimmed it to three digits.

What do the letters EMV stand for?

The three companies created the chip-card standard, now managed by the EMVCo consortium.

Which country deployed the first smart payment card standard, the Carte Bancaire B0M4, in 1986?

It has since migrated its entire card and terminal infrastructure to EMV.

When did the EMV fraud "liability shift" take effect for merchants in the United States?

After that date, merchants without chip-capable terminals became liable for resulting fraud, ten years after the EU.

What is the typical range of a credit card grace period?

Most cards offer no grace period at all if any balance is carried over from the previous statement.

US federal law limits a cardholder's liability for unauthorised credit card use to what figure?

The rule is in 15 U.S.C. § 1643, and the Fair Credit Billing Act sets out the dispute process.

Under the 2009 Credit CARD Act, how much notice must a card company give before raising fees?

The act took effect on 22 February 2010 and also requires consumers to opt in to over-limit charges.

What is the name of the standardised disclosure table that US credit card advertising must include?

It is named after the senator who pushed the disclosure rules through.

What fee do credit card cash advances typically incur?

Interest on a cash advance usually compounds daily from the moment the money is withdrawn, with no grace period.

What cap did the EU impose on interchange fees for consumer credit cards in April 2015?

Debit cards were capped at 0.2%; US fees averaged about 2% per transaction in 2008.

How much did US credit card companies collect in interchange fees in 2008?

That worked out at an average of $427 per family.

Roughly how many credit cards existed in the world in June 2018?

The United States alone had 1.09 billion in circulation in 2020, and 72.5% of American adults held at least one.

Which company bought the Diners Club network from Citigroup in 2008 for $165 million?

Citibank had owned the club since 1981; today the network belongs to Capital One.

What practice, in which minimum payments fall short of finance charges so the balance grows, was banned in 2003?

It masks the true quality of a lender's portfolio while quietly increasing credit risk.

Which 1978 Supreme Court case helped break the regional monopolies of the early US credit card industry?

A 2024 study found the resulting competition delivered significant gains for consumers, especially the poor.

As of 2007, the UK had how many credit cards per consumer, among the highest rates in the world?

The figure came from UK Payments Administration Ltd; global card use only caught up with the US, Canada and UK in the 1990s.

Until 1984, which US federal law prohibited surcharges on card transactions?

When the provisions expired, several states passed their own bans on card surcharges.

As of 2010, which country stayed cash-oriented, with cards used mainly at big merchants?

A law there enabling cash back from credit cards only came into force in 2010; cashless payment has grown sharply since.

Under which ISO/IEC standard does a credit card's magnetic stripe conform?

The card's physical size follows the separate ISO/IEC 7810 ID-1 standard.

In card-industry terms, what is a chargeback?

Chargebacks are usually initiated by the cardholder and are one of the costs merchants weigh against accepting cards.