# Visa Inc **Visa Inc** is the world's largest payment-card network and the dominant rail for U.S. debit and credit transactions. It began as Bank of America's BankAmericard, launched in Fresno in September 1958, took the Visa name in 1976 and went public in March 2008. With [[Mastercard]] it forms the card duopoly that the populist right and the antitrust left now attack from the same side. ## Why it is in the vault 1. **Antitrust defendant.** Visa is defending a [[Department of Justice]] monopolization suit over debit-card processing (below). 2. **Donor to a cabinet secretary's fund.** Visa contributed between **$100,000 and $499,999** to the [[USDA Secretary's Priorities Fund]] through the [[National Forest Foundation]] while adverse to the federal government in that litigation. A DOJ antitrust defendant writing a six-figure check into a cabinet secretary's discretionary fund is the top-of-the-distribution counterpart to the small-dollar prosecutions catalogued at [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]] and in [[Spending Gap - Fighting Fraud vs. the $277 Indictment]]. **Correction (2026-10-06):** an earlier version of this page said [[SNAP]] EBT transactions run over Visa. They do not: EBT cards carry state-issued numbers and settle over a separate network governed by the Quest operating rules. Visa's link to the SNAP story is as a donor to [[Brooke Rollins]]'s fund, not as a benefits processor. ## United States v. Visa (debit) Filed September 24, 2024, in the Southern District of New York (Judge John Koeltl). DOJ alleges Visa handles more than 60% of U.S. debit transactions and more than 65% of card-not-present debit, and protects that share through routing contracts that penalize merchants and issuers for using rival networks and through deals that pay would-be competitors, including fintechs, not to build alternatives. Koeltl denied Visa's motion to dismiss in June 2025. The [[Antitrust Division]] kept the case going under the second Trump administration; fact discovery runs to October 16, 2026, and trial is not expected before 2028 (one source). DOJ had already blocked Visa once: it sued in November 2020 to stop the $5.3 billion purchase of Plaid, and the deal was abandoned in January 2021. ## Swipe fees | Date | Event | |---|---| | 2005 | Merchants file the class action over interchange ("swipe") fees against Visa, Mastercard and the issuing banks | | 2024 | A proposed injunctive-relief settlement is rejected as inadequate | | Nov 2025 | New settlement: average credit interchange cut 0.1 percentage point for five years, standard consumer rates capped at 1.25% for eight years, merchants allowed to refuse whole card categories such as premium and commercial, and more room to surcharge. The parties value it at about $38 billion | | June 2026 | Judge Brian Cogan grants preliminary approval; the National Retail Federation and convenience-store trade group NACS oppose it | The [[Credit Card Competition Act]], reintroduced January 13, 2026 by [[Dick Durbin]] and [[Roger Marshall]], would require banks with more than $100 billion in assets to enable a second, non-Visa/Mastercard network on their credit cards. [[Donald Trump]] endorsed it on [[Truth Social]] the same morning. Past cosponsors include [[JD Vance]] and [[Josh Hawley]], which makes swipe fees one of the few places where the populist right lines up against a card network. ## Stablecoins In December 2025 Visa began settling with U.S. banks in [[Circle]]'s USDC on the Solana blockchain, starting with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank, after the [[GENIUS Act]] set federal rules for [[Stablecoin]] issuers. It is a hedge: the same rails that could route around the card networks are being folded into one. See [[Fintech Sector]]. ## See also - [[USDA Secretary's Priorities Fund]] · [[National Forest Foundation]] · [[Brooke Rollins]] · [[Trump Corruption News Log]] - [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]] · [[Influence Peddling]] · [[Antitrust]] · [[Department of Justice]] - [[Mastercard]] · [[Credit Card Competition Act]] · [[Fintech Sector]] · [[Circle]]