1. Credit card sizes are all the same no matter their brand or company. This is due to ISO 7810 standard which regulates all credit card sizes, ATMs, debit cards and all other identification cards. This makes the cards usable to any transaction at every country in the world.
2. The first six digits of a credit card determine which credit card company issued it. For exampl
3. The first advertisement about credit was done by Christopher Thornton in 1730. He sold furniture which were payable on a weekly basis.
4. Credit was first used 3000 years ago in ancient civilizations of Assyria, Egypt and Babylon.
5. The word credit is surprisingly a Latin word for “trust”.
6. Before the issuance of cards for credits, clothes paid on a weekly basis were recorded using wooden sticks. One side was marked with dents to represent the amount the person’s debt. The other side of the stick contains the record of payments made.
7. The first credit card company was Diners Club in New York City. It issued 200 cards initially and the cards were usable at 28 restaurants and night spots in New York. The cards were made of cardboard and on the front, customer’s name and account number were written while at the back, there shows the list of all the establishments the Diners Club cards were valid.
8. Magnetic stripes on credit cards were first used in the ‘70s when standardization of magnetic strip was established. Prior to that, however, other card system already used the magnetic stripe system such as the London Transit Authority in the 1960s. The same decade, San Francisco Bay Area implemented a paper ticket card, the same size as credit cards.
9. In 1959, the first plastic credit card was introduced by American Express. Prior to this, a bank credit card was made out of cardboards and celluloid.
10. Bank of America started the aggressive tactics in credit card marketing. Launching their , they mailed 60,000 cards to residents of Fresno California. Whether these residents were dead or not, they received credit cards by mail. Because of this, people discovered that mails containing credit cards were as good as the ones containing money. Credit card fraud and other scrupulous acts began to spread then is now Visa.
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