Chris Hutchins
speaker
980 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 16 Sep
Chris Hutchins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
back to 1850, where I think the kind of corporate formation of it started, but it wasn't for probably another century before cards existed.
But Amex was probably the first company that we think of for credit cards that was created back in 1850.
And funny enough,
two of the three founders were Henry Wells and William Fargo.
So the guys who eventually started Wells Fargo were the ones that actually started Amex.
And they were both started as express mail companies.
Amex focused on the East Coast, and then those founders left to start Wells Fargo a couple of years later to focus on the West Coast.
But that was not about credit cards, right?
1891, Amex kind of moved more into financial services with traveler's checks.
and it wasn't until around 1950 where we saw our first thing that kind of resembled a credit card and that was from diners club and so they created this card that allowed people to charge meals at restaurants and pay for it later it was almost like you could have a tab at a restaurant but it could be across multiple restaurants and they had about 20 000 people use it in the first year and about
10 years in, they had almost a million members.
So that was the first thing that kind of resembled what we would think of as a credit card today.
But you had to pay it off each month.
It wasn't something where you could carry a balance.
And it was Bank of America in 1958 created the Bank AmeriCard, and that let consumers carry a balance and pay interest.
And while it's not legal today, they had what seems like the craziest customer acquisition tactic, which is they sent actual credit cards unsolicited that worked to 10 million people.
And they started with a test pilot of 60,000 people in Fresno, and they just blanket sent credit cards that work to tons of people.
And to no surprise, 20% of those people were completely delinquent on their bills within the first year.
And the US government passed this Truth in Lending Act in 1968 that prohibited unsolicited credit cards.
But believe it or not, that was how the first credit card got out in the ecosystem.
Showing 801–820 of 980 · page 41 of 49
← Previous
Next →