An alternative to the corporation is the chaord. This is an idea that went nowhere. Except that Visa International was a chaord. A chaord is useful when you have a shared resource that's needed by competing entities. That's exactly what Visa International was set up to be. It's an operator of a data network and a standards body. It doesn't issue cards. It doesn't handle money. It just transmits transaction data between point of sale, merchant's bank, and card issuer's bank. It's in the interests of all the banks involved that it work well, be a neutral party, and not cost too much. A chaord is useful when you have something that's a natural monopoly, but the customers don't want it charging monopoly rents. It's not idealistic. It's a practical solution to that class of problems.
Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.)
His optimistic book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age", is still available.
There used to be a "chaord" article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock's article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.
Dee Hock, an executive of a minor bank, set this up. The big banks wanted someone relatively neutral in charge of the Visa system. (He died just two weeks ago, I just found out.) His optimistic book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age", is still available.
There used to be a "chaord" article on Wikipedia, but it was merged into Dee Hock's article after Visa became an ordinary corporation.