Did you ever wonder, "When did credit cards start and who was the first?"
Well sit back and ConnectedPay will tell you a little story.
The Origin of Payment Cards
The first payment card can be traced back to the local “Charg-It” card introduced by John Biggins in his Brooklyn neighborhood in 1946, the Franklin National Bank in New York formalized the practice by introducing the first bank-issued credit card in 1951. Over the next decade, several banks emerged in major cities to work with customer merchants to accept payment cards. However, this system limited consumers’ use of payment cards to an area restricted by the regional banks’ merchant customers.
The concept of a wider payment network was born in the mid-1960s when the InterBank Card Association (now MasterCard Worldwide) brought consistency to credit cards. InterBank developed payment network systems to process the exchange of funds between merchants and cardholders, standardized the billing process, and established rules and procedures to reduce fraud and other abuses.
The first debit transaction, using an automatic teller machine (ATM) card and personal identification number (PIN) to make a purchase at the point of sale (POS), occurred in the 1980s, and the first debit transaction authorized by a signature rather than a PIN was processed in 1988.
This history lesson compliments of MasterCard Worldwide
