<P> Visa has operations across all continents worldwide with the exception of Antarctica . Nearly all Visa transactions worldwide are processed through VisaNet at one of two secure facilities: Operations Center East, located near Ashburn, Virginia; and Operations Center Central, located near Highlands Ranch, Colorado . Both data centers are heavily secured against natural disasters, crime, and terrorism; can operate independently of each other and from external utilities if necessary; and can handle up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations every second . Every transaction is checked past 500 variables including 100 fraud - detection parameters--such as the location and spending habits of the customer and the merchant's location--before being accepted . </P> <P> Visa is the world's second - largest card payment organization (debit and credit cards combined), after being surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015, based on annual value of card payments transacted and number of issued cards . Because UnionPay's size is based primarily on the size of its domestic market, Visa is dominant in the rest of the world outside of China, with 50% market share of global card payments minus China . </P> <P> In mid-September 1958, Bank of America (BofA) launched its BankAmericard credit card program in Fresno, California, with an initial mass mailing (or "drop", as they came to be called) of 60,000 unsolicited credit cards . The original idea was the brainchild of BofA's in - house product development think tank, the Customer Services Research Group, and its leader, Joseph P. Williams . Williams convinced senior BofA executives in 1956 to let him pursue what became the world's first successful mass mailing of unsolicited credit cards (actual working cards, not mere applications) to a large population . </P> <P> Williams' pioneering accomplishment was that he brought about the successful implementation of the all - purpose credit card (in the sense that his project was not cancelled outright), not in coming up with the idea . By the mid-1950s, the typical middle - class American already maintained revolving credit accounts with several different merchants, which was clearly inefficient and inconvenient due to the need to carry so many cards and pay so many separate bills each month . The need for a unified financial instrument was already evident to the American financial services industry, but no one could figure out how to do it . There were already charge cards like Diners Club (which had to be paid in full at the end of each billing cycle), and "by the mid-1950s, there had been at least a dozen attempts to create an all - purpose credit card ." However, these prior attempts had been carried out by small banks which lacked the resources to make them work . Williams and his team studied these failures carefully and believed they could avoid replicating those banks' mistakes; they also studied existing revolving credit operations at Sears and Mobil Oil to learn why they were successful . Fresno was selected for its population of 250,000 (big enough to make a credit card work, small enough to control initial startup cost), BofA's market share of that population (45%), and relative isolation, to control public relations damage in case the project failed . </P>

What did bank americard change its name to in 1958