Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Amazing. Maybe the most important thing, though, for Visa, really pulling away and becoming, at least for many decades, the dominant global payment card network. The name change ends up becoming this incredible growth hack, because what happens is they're the new operating regulations now that mandate that all cards out there, all the previous BankAmericards need to be migrated to Visa cards I think within two years of this being declared or something like that. Some banks start to see this as an opportunity to go poach card holders from other banks. The competition within the network, obviously this still exists, because consumers now know and Visa runs a national advertising campaign. Hey, your BankAmericard is going to switch to Visa. Some banks in aversion to the Fresno drop, they start sending unsolicited letters to consumers who are already Visa BankAmericard customers with another bank. They're like, oh, hey, it's time to switch over to your Visa card, here's the application, sign up with this. Nice of them to, at this point in history, offer applications. I think a hundred million cards got dropped in the United States before the government made it illegal to just start randomly issuing credit to people without their awareness or asking for it. Totally wild. But because of this, a whole bunch of consumers start unconsciously switching the bank that issues their Visa card. Once this starts happening, this kicks off a total arms race, where all the banks in the network are now like, shoot, we got to blanket the whole country, preserve our domain, and see what we can capture from others. In the one year between when the Visa name change first comes online and takes effect, which is in 1977 and the next year in 1978, the number of banks participating in the Visa system grows by 20%, because everybody who's not in the system now is like, I got to get in the Visa system.…

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