Dee Hock, the junior-college-educated banker who shaped the Visa credit card into a global financial giant, died on July 16 at his home in Olympia, Washington. He was 93 years old.
His son David confirmed the death.
In 1966, the credit card business was in a difficult early stage of development when Mr. Hoch was appointed head of the credit card division of the National Bank of Commerce in Seattle.
At the time, businesses were plagued with bad debts and fraud, and the cards themselves were primitive. There was no magnetic stripe to later encode customer information. Transactions that required bank approval took a long time. And the embossed information (customer name, card number, expiration date) was clumsily copied onto the receipt with a heavy imprinter.
“By 1968, I was very worried that the industry would decline and that bank investments would fail.” Mr. Hoch told PlasmaPortland, Oregon-based arts and politics magazine, 2013.
He became the leader of the Board of Licensed Bankers of BankAmericard, first issued in 1958. The panel’s mission is to determine the future of the cards. (The American Express card debuted the same year. Eight years before that, the Diners Club had issued what is widely considered the first credit card.)
The commission’s solution was to create a new company, the National Bank America Card, separate from Bank of America, controlled by the bank that issued the card. Mr. Hoch has been appointed president and chief executive officer. In 1976, after an internal contest, the company was renamed Visa.
As CEO, he oversaw the development of the first electronic authorization system and the first interbank electronic clearing and settlement system. Banks, not Visa, issued the cards and were required to add a magnetic stripe to the cards.
“Dee Hock realized in the late 1960s what few other people really understood: Computers and telecommunications soon made it possible to build a worldwide system of ‘electronic exchange of value’. and customers will be able to pay for goods and services “wherever they are”. ‘, David Stearns, author of Electronic Value Exchange: Origins of the VISA Electronic Payment System (2011), wrote in an email. (Company names appear in all caps.)
In the obituary, Visa CEO Alfred Kelly Jr.wrote Mr. Hoch had a vision of “a world of frictionless commerce where anyone, anywhere can exchange value 24/7 with absolute reliability.”
This vision has long since come to fruition, and Visa has become the world’s leading credit card network, with 3.9 billion cards issued and $13 trillion in gross purchases.
“There’s no denying what he did. He made credit cards work,” said former New York Times columnist and author of Hock’s book Part of the Action: How the Middle Class Participated in the Money Class. 1994) said Joe Nocera. ), he said in a phone interview. “He took a system on the brink of collapse and said, ‘Follow me, I’ll take you to the promised land.'”
Dee Ward Hoch was born on March 21, 1929 in North Ogden, Utah. His father, Alma, was a utility lineman. His mother, Cecil (Dawson) Hoch, was a homemaker.
As a boy, Dee was fascinated by the biology and ecology around him in rural Utah, but after graduating from Ogden’s two-year Weber State University (now University) in 1949, he pursued a career in banking. I walked
For the next 17 years, Mr. Hook was the manager of two branches of Pacific Finance Bank. Assistant Manager of Public Relations and Advertising for Pacific. General Manager of Columbia Investment Company. Supervisor of CIT Financial (now Group). He was hired by the National Bank of Commerce in 1966. But before joining the bank, he was “basically retired from work,” his son said in an interview.
“He was usually the most successful part of the organization when people left him alone,” added David Hoch. they I wanted to fix it, but they usually screwed it up. ”
Inspired by his work at Visa, Mr. Hoch shifted the company to offering f debit cards, which allow cardholders not only to access checking accounts, but also premium cards and money market funds.
“Mr. Hoch is a brilliant strategist and perhaps a brilliant mind,” Helen Duffy, a consultant in the field of electronic funds transfers, told The Times in 1981. That’s the basic goal. ”
In addition to his son David, Mr. Hoch is survived by a daughter, Lynette Else. seven grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. His wife, her Ferol (Cragun) Hock, died in 2018. Already his one son, Steven, died in 2012.
At Visa, Mr. Hoch encouraged innovation and experimentation among employees and credit card licensed banks. Rather than run the company under a traditional hierarchical management system, he sought input from the bottom up.
This was the right way to manage a business where member banks were competing with each other for customers and at the same time having to work together to make Visa work effectively. But he admitted to Fast Company In the 1996 magazine, Visa had implemented only about 25% of what he called a “chaotic” management concept: a balance between chaos and order.
As he explained, the concept applies to organizations and businesses where power is widely distributed. He wrote his two books about it, “The Birth of the Chaordic Age” (1999) and “One From Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization” (1999).
Mr. Hoch retired from Visa to become a rancher in 1984, but eight years later began consulting with the organization about his chaotic thoughts.
In “One From Many,” he recalled addressing the group and asking them what they thought were the most important responsibilities of a manager.
The answers he wrote were all “downward-looking. It has to do with the exercise of authority, employee selection, motivation, training, evaluation, organization, direction and management.”
He added, “That perception is completely wrong. In a chaotic organization, like all organizations, you need to be on top of your head.”
