Visa

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Visa

Basic information
Founded	1958-09-18
Legal Structure	Public
Industry	Financial services
Official website	https://www.visa.com

Visa is an American payment card service that serves customers in many nations worldwide, founded by Bank of America in 1958 as BankAmericard. Bank of America gave up control in 1970 to a cooperative, and it was renamed Visa in 1976. The company facilitates electronic funds transfers as a payment processor.

As a payment processor, Visa does not issue cards or offer credit; it provides financial institutions (e.g., banks) with tools that allow for transactions to take place between parties that are not served by the same institution or are not located in the same general region.

Consumer-impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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Visa has been refusing to process certain payments for completely legal transactions, on the grounds that these transactions were things that hurting their brand, most notably involving the delisting of games from Steam and itch.io for having adult content. There has been widespread backlash against Visa for forcing platforms to censor content that is perceived to hurt Visa's reputation.

Incidents

Add one-paragraph summaries of incidents below in sub-sections, which link to each incident's main article while linking to the main article and including a short summary. It is acceptable to create an incident summary before the main page for an incident has been created. To link to the page use the "Hatnote" or "Main" templates.

If the company has numerous incidents then format them in a table (see Amazon for an example).

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This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Visa category.

Valve allows ISPs and payment processors to censor content on Steam (2025)

Main article: Valve allows ISPs and payment processors to censor content on Steam

At an unknown date in 2025, Valve updated its Rules and Guidelines for developers on Steam. These rules granted internet service providers (ISPs) and banks/transaction providers the power to delist games from their platform. Consumers have shown considerable criticism despite the nature of the content removed from the platform due to the vagueness of these rules leaving a window open for expanded censorship.

Example incident two (date)

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Products

This is a list of the company's product lines with articles on this wiki.

• Example product line one (release date): Short summary of the product's incidents.
• Example product line two (release date):

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See also

• Collective Shout
• Mastercard