chapter VISA: THE FIRST FINTECH 05TRANSFORMING THE ECOSYSTEM Financial Ecosystem, Puzzle among Technology and money have always been a powerful binomial. In the 20th Century, its Players the decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw a new wave of innovation in the financial industry. In 1959, the MICR (Magnetic Ink Character Recognition) technology was implemented, which standardized automated check code reading machines, driven by the American Bank Association. The first ATM came into operation in London in 1967, installed by Barclays with technology from the British company De La Rue. In 1973, SWIFT was established, an international network that established standards for electronic payments among 239 banks in fifteen countries. All these innovations changed the rules of the game for the entire ecosystem and the success in its implementation depended on generating coordination mechanisms. Mechanisms related to disruption, coopetition and open innovation of which Chris- tensen, Brandenburger and Chesbrough would talk in depth and establish categories and conceptualizations three or four decades later. Among these changes, one of the most interesting was the evolution of credit card systems. Many banks, since the 1950s, had tried to launch a credit card that could be used to pay for anything. In the 1960s, Bank of America started in California with the BankAmericard system, which proved very successful, but which began to have difficulties when it came to scaling up the licensing model to a growing number of banks. A TWO-WAY PATH 57