[TheNewsIsHere]

Something that people don’t understand, which your comment sort of indirectly alludes to, is that Visa and MasterCard started as and for most of their existence were essentially a shared services center for financial institutions that wanted to participate in a common payment network.

The legal structure has changed, but the boards of both are still primarily comprised of executives from other major financial services institutions.

Risk averse and sensitive to regulatory pressure by nature, the issue isn’t with Visa and MasterCard directly. They’re just operating in a space.

[jallmann]

Yes! The book "One From Many" from Dee Hock, the Visa founder, discusses this formation in depth. For a long time, Visa's governance structure was quite unusual due to it being a consortium of stakeholders, some with very different interests.

Somewhat ironically, Hock's "chaordic" management philosophy has strong parallels with ethos of decentralization held by some crypto idealists.