Visa’s founding CEO Dee Hock, whose vision and dogged perseverance did more than any other man to create the open global general-purpose bankcard payment networks, died July 16th. Hock’s Visa and cousin Mastercard became the world’s leading payment networks, thus improving the lives of billions of people. Both continue to scale, extend, and enrich their platforms.
Yet arguably, the global payment-network duopoly has never faced a greater and more diverse array of threats. The late Intel CEO Andy Grove warned “Only the paranoid survive.” A modicum of paranoia at Mastercard and Visa and less pro forma corporate wokery, would augur better for shareholders, client financial institutions, and end customers.
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