Credit

Credit Karma Corporate Office

Credit Karma was founded by Kennith Lin, who had previously worked at E-Loan and Upromise, in 2008.

The company was funded by investors Chris Larson and Mark Lefanowicz. Five years later in 2013, Credit Karma received a $30 million investment from Ribbit Capital and Susquehanna Growth Equity.

Credit Karma is a web-based credit and financial management service that is free for consumers. The company provides free credit scores and free credit monitoring. It also teaches consumers how to improve their credit score and lets them check their credit score as often as they like to review possible improvements.

Credit Karma also offers financial account monitoring through the service Yodlee. This service allows consumers to track their bank, credit card, savings, and loan transactions.

Bloomingdale’s Corporate Office

Brothers Joseph and Lyman G. Bloomingdale opened their first shop in 1872 at 938 Third Avenue in New York City.

At the time the Upper East Side of Manhattan was a working-class neighborhood with shantytowns, garbage dumps, and stockyards. Within a few years of the store opening the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened, Central Park was finished, and the Lexington Avenue line started construction, all of which brought wealthier customers to the neighborhood.

In 1886 the store moved to its current location at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue. This was the center of the horse-drawn trolley system in New York and a convenient location for the store.

Today Bloomingdale’s is a chain of more than 35 upscale department stores and home stores in a dozen states. Bloomingdale’s is a subsidiary of Macy’s.

The Bloomingdale’s flagship store in New York City is a Manhattan institution and a tourist attraction.

MasterCard Corporate Office

MasterCard was created in 1966 by several California banks as a competitor to the BankAmericard issued by Bank of America, which later became the Visa credit card.

Originally MasterCard was called “Master Charge: The Interbank Card.”

In 1969 the company teamed up with Eurocard, creating a strategic alliance that gave MasterCard access to the European market.

Today MasterCard Worldwide is a multinational financial services corporation whose principal business is to process payments between banks of merchants and the card-issuing banks or credit unions of the purchasers.

MasterCard provides its services in 210 countries and territories and its cards are accepted at 35 million locations worldwide.

Both Mastercard and Visa have paid approximately $3 billion in damages resulting from a class-action lawsuit filed in January 1996. The litigation cites several retail giants as plaintiffs, including WalMart, Sears, and Safeway.

In November 2019, Mastercard announced that they would begin allowing transgender people to use their preferred names on their cards starting in 2020.

MasterCard has been a publicly traded company since 2006, trading on the New York Stock exchange under the symbol MA. MasterCard is a member of the S&P 500, is #384 in the Fortune 500, is #113 in FT Global 500, has 13,400 employees and had $12.497 billion in revenue in 2017.

TransUnion Corporate Office

In 1968 the Union Tank Car Company, a rail-car leasing corporation, created TransUnion as its parent company.

In 1969 the company acquired the Credit Bureau of Cook County, a credit bureau that maintained 3.6 million credit card files in 400 filing cabinets.

TransUnion is known for creating the first online information storage and retrieval data processing system, which provided credit grantors all over the United States with one source for reliable consumer credit information.

In the 1990’s TransUnion extended operations to business to business offerings.

Today TransUnion is the third-largest credit bureau in the United States, providing service to 45,000 businesses and 500 million consumers worldwide.

TransUnion had $2.656 billion in revenue in 2019.

In October 2021, the company announced that it would sell TransUnion Healthcare to a private entitity for $1.74 billion in an all cash deal.

Also in October 2021, TransUnion announced a $400,000 commitment to advance financial inclusion with Credit Builder’s Alliance.

TransUnion maintains a corporate office in Chicago, Illinois.

Visa Corporate Office

Visa has its roots in the 1958 launching of Bank of America‘s BankAmericard program, where 60,000 pre-approved unsolicited credit cards were mailed out in Fresno, California.

The BankAmericard was the first all-purpose credit card on the market, replacing the individual merchant accounts that consumers had until that time.

This experiment ultimately failed, but the company later realized that the idea was salvageable by implementing proper financial controls and publishing an open letter to 3 million households apologizing for the fiasco.

By the time mailings of unsolicited credit cards was outlawed in 1970, 100 million BankAmericard credit cards had been distributed in the United States.

In 1970 Bank of America gave up control of the program. The various BankAmericard issuer banks created National BankAmericard Inc (NBI), an independent corporation, to be in charge of managing and promoting the card.

IBANCO was formed to manage the international BankAmericard program.

The name “Visa” was created by IBANCO founder Dee Hock. He believed the word was recognizable in many languages.

Today Visa is a multinational financial services corporation. Visa facilitates electronic funds transfers, most commonly through Visa-branded credit cards and debit cards.

Visa trades publicly on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol V, is a member of the S&P 500, is #66 in FT Global 500, is #260 in the Fortune 500, has 17,000 employees, and had $20.609 billion in revenue in 2018

The company is the world’s second-largest card payment organization. Visa has operations across all six continents. Nearly all Visa transactions worldwide are processed through the company’s directly-operated VisaNet at one of four secure data centers, located in Ashburn, Virginia, Highlands Ranch, Colorado, London, England, and Singapore. These facilities are heavily secured against natural disasters, crime, and terrorism. They can operate independently of each other and from external utilities if necessary and can handle up to 30,000 simultaneous transactions and up to 100 billion computations every second.

Privacy issues have become a great concern, as a Forbes writer noted, and Visa is one of the offenders, selling information about your buying habits.

Food giant Kroger has slowly been banning Visa card use due to their high fees, with the most recent announcement in March 2019 that it would no longer accept Visa cards for payments at their Smith’s Food and Drug stores beginning April 3rd, 2019.