Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It's crazy, that was 1993. Compare that to today. I don't know about you, but I get pissed when somebody ahead of me in line starts breaking out cash and coins. I'm like, oh my God. What are you doing? Start us back. I think the last time we checked in on how the settlement worked was around literally collecting paper sales drafts and then starting to mail it around. To get from there to today, three major pieces of technology needed to be built by Visa. One was transaction authorizations. When we were talking about transactions happening earlier and the person in Burger King was referencing like, oh, they got a call to New York, they got to authorize the transaction, and all that, we glossed over one stop gap/band aid that Visa and other credit card networks implemented around authorization. They didn't actually authorize every transaction. When you paid for something with a credit card in a store, all merchants had what was called a floor limit. The floor limit was any transaction over that limit could not be authorized directly on the floor and say it was $50 or something like that. Anything paid with a credit card under $50 was basically within the judgment of the cashier to say yes or no. Everybody just said, yes. The reality was, this was the threshold below which the banks and Visa were willing to say, okay, we'll accept a certain amount of fraud. Above that limit, the cashier had to go call up the merchant bank and say, hey, we got a card here, it's this number, somebody's buying a refrigerator, then that merchant bank would have to look up that card number, figure out based on the card number, what bank issued the card to the card holder, call up the card holder bank, and get somebody on the horn there and say, hey, I've got your caller ID holder, Benjamin Gilbert, his card number is XYZ123, can you look up his credit? He wants to buy a $500 refrigerator. Can you tell me if he's good for it?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.