Thursday, August 11, 2022
The cards themselves were primitive, with only embossed information that had to be checked against paper lists of bad accounts and embossed on paper receipts using "knuckle busters." Hock, who was running the BankAmericard business at National Bank of Commerce in Seattle, led a group of executives from other BankAmericard licensee banks in mapping-out the 10-year-old card brand's future.
The solution they came up with was to spin off the credit card business from Bank of America. The new company, named BankAmericard, would be owned by card-issuing banks. Hock was named president and CEO. Eight years later, following an in-house contest, the company was renamed Visa International. Visa became a public company in 2008 in what at the time was described as the largest stock offering in history.
"Dee would be the first to admit that he didn't invent the credit card. He did, however, apply a combination of vision, drive and no small amount of brinkmanship to forge an organization that has changed the way the world pays over the course of the last 60 years," Visa Chairman and CEO Al Kelly said in a statement posted to Visa's website. "He envisioned a world of frictionless commerce where anyone, anywhere could exchange value '24 hours a day, seven days a week,' with absolute reliability, and that would transcend language, culture and currency."
That vision led Visa to become the world's leading credit card network. In 2021, there were 3.7 billion Visa cards in circulation, worldwide, and the network processed $13 trillion in transactions.
Hock could also be "fiercely competitive," Kelly said. "When he heard another payment network was developing a computerized authorization, clearing and settlement system at the same time as National BankAmericard Inc., he pushed his team to launch VisaNet in 1973, ensuring that Visa would be the first organization to fully digitize card transactions at the point of sale," Kelly recounted.
"I doubt people realize how much the way we all live these days came from the mind of Dee Hock," said Bill Moroney, a payments visionary who served as president of the EFT Association in the 1980s, and later was president of Nacha.
Hock retired from Visa in 1984 to become a rancher and write books. In 1999, he authored the book Birth of the Chaordic Age, espousing the need for a balance of chaos and order to foster success in business.
"When Visa International came into being, its behavior was neither traditional nor merely innovative. It was chaordic and open to surprise," he wrote. "For more than a decade, until I left in 1984, I worked in the midst of such increasing complexity, testing its strengths and weaknesses, learning from both joyous and bitter experience the demands of leading such systemic diversity, discovering the richness of diffusion of power and wealth, exploring the limits of individual capacity for change, and studying how to increase it. It was nothing but learning, learning, learning as we walked the knife's edge between order and chaos, between cooperation and competition, between compelled and induced behavior; struggling to escape the mechanistic, separatist, linear mindset that insists we bifurcate everything into quantifiable, combative opposites."
Hock is survived by a son, a daughter and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren. 
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