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.
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Diners Club International was acquired by Discover Financial Services in 2008 and is operated as its subsidiary.
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