Diners Club Card

The Diners Club Card, launched in New York in 1950 by Frank McNamara, Ralph Schneider and Alfred Bloomingdale, is widely credited as the first general-purpose charge card, initially accepted at a small number of restaurants before expanding to travel and other merchants. It established the basic charge-card model, a card issuer settling with merchants and billing the cardholder later, that American Express, and eventually the bank-issued Visa and Mastercard networks, built on and expanded into the mass consumer market.