The Mount Rushmore of Payments

Which of the payments industry’s biggest players would you nominate for the Mt. Rushmore of payments?

A few suggestions, courtesy of PYMNTS.com (left to right in the above image):

– Frank McNamara. On one fateful afternoon in 1949, after having just finished lunch at a restaurant in Manhattan, Frank McNamara reached for his wallet — and found that he had forgotten it at home. The embarrassment led to an epiphany.

McNamara would recruit fourteen New York City restaurants to comprise the Diner’s Club, the first merchants to accept a credit card to pay for purchases. One year later, 42,000 cardholders had signed on (each paid a membership fee), along with 330 U.S. restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs, each of which paid 7% of cardholder spending to Diners Club management.

In effect, Frank McNamara had invented the world’s first credit card.

– Ralph Reed. American Express was founded in 1850 as an express mail company. Nearly a century later, with Ralph Reed at the helm, the company would enter the charge card market.

At the time of the American Express card’s debut, the company had recruited 17,500 merchants and 250,000 cardholders. (Its rapid growth was hastened by the acquisition of the Gourmet Magazine Club and the Universal Travelcard.) Two years later, its roster of cardholders had tripled in size, to 750,000 consumers.

In 1959, the company was the first to issue plastic credit cards.

– Dee Hock. Hock founded the company that would become the VISA credit card association in 1970, transforming a failed subsidiary of Bank of America into a successful financial network of payments processors.

The program Hock took over was called BankAmericard. Bank of America’s attempt at entering the payment card market was started with an unsolicited mailing to thousands of residents in Fresno, Calif., in 1958. To spur growth, the bank later signed franchise agreements with other banks across the globe. And when delinquencies and red ink scared BOA executives into giving up the business, the franchisees took over, combining to form an independent non-stock corporation called National BankAmericard Inc. in 1970. Dee Hock was that company’s first president and CEO.

Today, the Visa Inc. enterprise is worth nearly $100 billion, according to its current market capitalization.

Who would you etch on the Mount Rushmore of Payments? Join the PYMNTS.com discussion below.