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It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
Everyone benefits from each other:
Customers and Banks:
Customers want to have always-available credit
Banks want to provide credit with high fees and interest rates
Customers and Merchants:
Customers want to have a card that works everywhere
Merchants want to be able to accept payments from anyone
Merchants and Banks:
Merchants want to be able to sell on credit while still getting their money immediately
Banks want to collect a fee on every purchase in exchange for managing credit and pooling risk
Visa and Mastercard, the other major credit card network,1 sit in the middle of each of these relationships, across billions of customers, millions of merchants, and thousands of banks, collecting a network fee — on top of the interchange fee paid to banks — on every purchase (about 0.05%). The total revenue collected — $20.6 billion in 2018 — is rather small, particularly relative to Visa’s market cap of $420 billion, but that multiple is a testament to just how durable Visa’s position is in the network it created.
Visa, Plaid, Networks, and Jobs
Ben Thompson
Average life expectancy was apparently just thirty to forty years, but this was due largely to the high incidence of child mortality. Children who made it through the perilous first years had a good chance of reaching the age of sixty, and some even made it to their eighties.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
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