David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Wow. Amazing. Very shortly after this, after the creation of NBI (National BankAmericard Inc), Dee in 1972 is thinking globally from the get-go. He goes and creates a parallel, similar organization of international banks using the BankAmericard system. Visa was global from basically day one. It wasn't just Barclays in the UK, it was Sumitomo bank in Japan, it was other banks throughout Europe, it was Canada, it was Latin America. We won't go into all the detail here, except one amazing story we're going to tell. This was actually harder to pull off, if you can imagine that, than forming NBI, because it really is not clear for some of these international banks that it is better for them to be part of the global network than if they could run the table on their entire country. Say you're Sumitomo bank in Japan. You have to decide, do I want to buy Dee's pitch of it's worth it to me to be a proportional owner of Visa? Or I could be the singular dominant credit card network in my own country. Which is more valuable? For many of them, they'd be right in saying, it actually would be better to be singular and dominant. You look at China Union Pay. That is the dominant way of payments flowing in China. That was, for them, the right move.…

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