Dee Hock, a banker with a college degree who turned the Visa credit card into a global financial behemoth, died July 16 at his home in Olympia, Wash. He was 93.
His son David confirmed death.
The credit card business was in an early rocky stage of development in 1966 when Mr. Hock was appointed to head the credit card division of the National Bank of Commerce in Seattle, which had been licensed by Bank of America to issue its BankAmericard.
At the time, the company was plagued by bad debt and fraud, and the cards themselves were primitive: they lacked the magnetic stripes that would later encode customer information; transactions requiring bank authorizations took a long time; and the information embossed on it – customer name, card number, expiration date – was awkwardly copied onto receipts with a heavy imprinter.
“By 1968, I was very concerned that the industry would go under and with it our bank’s investments,” Mr. Hock told Plazm, an arts and political magazine based in Portland, Oregon, in 2013. “I attended a meeting of all BofA licensees, which quickly became a jumble of arguments and accusations.”
He became the leader of a committee of bankers whose institutions licensed the BankAmericard, which was first issued in 1958. The panel’s mission: to determine the future of the card. (The American Express card made its debut that same year; eight years earlier, Diners Club had issued what is widely considered the first credit card.)
The committee’s solution was to create a new company, National BankAmericard, which would be separate from Bank of America and controlled by the banks that issued the card. Mr. Hock was named president and chief executive. In 1976, after an internal competition, the company was renamed Visa.
As Managing Director, he oversaw the development of the first electronic authorization system and the first interbank electronic clearing and settlement system. Banks would issue the cards, not Visa, and they were instructed to add the magnetic stripe to their cards.
“Dee Hock realized something in the late 1960s that few others really understood: computers and telecommunications would soon make it possible to build a global ‘electronic value exchange’ system that would soon enable customers to buy goods and services. pay ‘wherever you want to be,’” wrote David Stearns, the author of “Electronic Value Exchange: Origins of the VISA Electronic Payment System” (2011), in an email. (The company displays its name in capital letters). .)
In tribute, Visa CEO Alfred Kelly Jr. wrote that Mr. Hock had envisioned “a world of frictionless trading where anyone, anywhere, can exchange value 24 hours a day, seven days a week with absolute reliability.” .”
That vision, long realized, has made Visa the world’s largest credit card network, with 3.9 billion cards issued and a total purchase volume of $13 trillion.
“What he did was undeniable: he made credit cards work,” Joe Nocera, a former New York Times columnist who wrote about Mr. Hock wrote in his book “A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class” (1994), said in a telephone interview. “He took a system that was on the brink of collapse and said, ‘Follow me, I’ll take you to the promised land.'”
Dee Ward Hock was born on March 21, 1929 in North Ogden, Utah. His father, Alma, was a lineman at a utility company. His mother, Cecil (Dawson) Hock, was a homemaker.
As a boy, Dee became enamored with the biology and ecology around him in rural Utah, but he pursued a career as a banker after graduating from two-year Weber State College (now university) in Ogden in 1949.
For the next 17 years, Mr. Hock was the manager of two branches of the Pacific Finance bank; an assistant public relations and advertising manager for Pacific; general manager of the Columbia Investment Company; and a supervisor at CIT Financial (now Group). He was hired in 1966 by the National Bank of Commerce. But before joining, he had “essentially retired,” his son said in an interview.
“When people left him alone, he was usually the most successful part of the organization,” added David Hock. “But when she wanted to fix it, they usually screwed up.”
Encouraged by his work at Visa, Mr. Hock led the company to offer fdebit cards, which gave cardholders access to checking accounts, as well as a premium card and money market fund.
“Mr. Hock is a great strategist, maybe even brilliant,” Helene Duffy, an electronic funds transfer advisor, told The Times in 1981. That basic goal.”
In addition to his son David, Mr. Hock has a daughter, Lynette Elze; seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. His wife, Ferol (Cragun) Hock, died in 2018. Another son, Steven, died in 2012.
At Visa, Mr. Hock innovated and experimented – among his employees and among the banks that licensed the credit card. Rather than run the company under a traditional hierarchical management system, he sought input from the bottom up.
It was an appropriate way to run a business whose member banks compete with each other for customers, but at the same time need to work together for Visa to work effectively. But, he admitted to Fast Company magazine in 1996, Visa implemented only about 25 percent of what he called its “chaordic” management concept: a balance of chaos and order.
That concept, as he explained it, applies to organizations and corporations where power is rife. He wrote two books about it, “Birth of the Chaordic Age” (1999) and “One From Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization” (1999).
Mr. Hock resigned from Visa in 1984 to become a rancher, but eight years later began consulting organizations about his chaotic ideas.
In “One From Many,” he recalled speaking to groups and asking them what they believed to be the most important responsibility of a manager.
All the answers, he wrote, were “downward-looking — they had to do with exercising authority, selecting employees, motivating them, educating them, assessing, organizing, directing and controlling.”
He added: “That perception is completely wrong. In chaordic organizations it has to be turned upside down, as in all organizations.
