Shoppers of a certain age might remember something called the BankAmericard. Then-independent Bank of America saw an opportunity in the credit card market to send plastic (with a top credit limit of $300) to users who might prefer to carry a balance from month-to-month. An association of banks was formed to offer the card to their customers, and the product that would become Visa Inc. was born. San Francisco-based Visa itself has never extended credit — it makes its money from fees collected on individual credit card transactions. And that low-risk model is a reason Visa’s 2008 IPO was oversubscribed. Today Visa Inc. is the world’s largest electronic payments network, with revenues of about $7 billion per year.
THE QUICK BIO
Joshua Floum joined Visa in 2004 and helped organize the association’s transition into a public company. But he was no stranger to the card business before then. Floum had been chairman of the California litigation practice for Holme Roberts & Owen, where he specialized in antitrust and competition law, intellectual property, bankcard and banking practices and telecommunications law. Floum says he was recruited by former Visa General Counsel Paul Allen — “I thought he was calling to give me work, but I was pleasantly surprised that he wanted me to apply for his job.” Before joining Holme Roberts, Floum was a senior partner in the law firms of Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe and Legal Strategies Group, and was a judicial law clerk to then-U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima. He earned his bachelor’s in international economics and political science from UC-Berkeley and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is married to Maggie O’Donnell, a former litigator with McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen. They have two children.
