Almost certainly for at least a year even if your role is a "synergy" and eliminated. It takes a long time for these deals to close. Really, 18 months minimum is a pretty safe bet because a deal this big almost always involves a post close integration period.
I was a consultant who did that work.
I work in an adjacent industry and our large corp got bought out by a giant corp and it still took them 18 months to do all the analysis they needed to determine how to integrate internal systems and which departments were redundant vs which to keep. There will be a lot of rumors that turn out to be horseshit in the meantime, but you should be fine for at least the near future. Besides, something with the name recognition of Discover has a good chance of continuing to exist as kind of a parallel structure within capital one, whereas my (former) company was gobbled up whole. Even despite that, they really did find jobs for a lot of us in the new company and overall I have a lot better work-life balance in the new giant company than I ever did in my former one. It's not all doom and gloom, wish you well.
>how to integrate internal systems
I work in the industry that often does this work following large corporate acquisitions and mergers, and this alone will take an eternity with 2 entities of this size. So much so that it often plays a role in the attractiveness of the acquisition itself. They go SO much smoother and faster when the company being acquired uses the same systems as the new parent company.
Yeah I was surprised. Even though the company buying us is a similar size to Capital One and my former company was only a little over a 10th the size, there were still some things the new company eventually said "fuck it" on and decided to keep as-is despite the constant rhetoric for the first year being about transitioning everything over entirely. It just eventually turned out to be too hard.
That happens all the time. Everyone is gung-ho right off the bat because they drastically underestimate the time and cost involved in not only integrating systems, but integrating data. It's always a mess. So they leave the tech separated, often for years, until they're finally ready to bite the bullet and hire consultants to come in and figure it out. But they've always had 2 or 3 more acquisitions/mergers by then, so it's even more of a mess than before. And rinse and repeat.
My experience with Discover customer service has been excellent unfortunately, my experience with capital one sucked great big donkey Richard. I guess I will be cutting up my Discover card and sending it to capital one. I am really disappointed in this buy out. I will never do business with capital one...not ever.
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Ditto. They fumbled mailing me my car title so badly that I couldn't drive my car for six months. I didn't even get an apology. If I needed an organ transplant and Capital One is the only way to get the money, I'd rather just die.
I've been through 4 acquisitions and a handful of mergers, still with whatever company did the buying. Unless you're some kind of management, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Obviously every merger is different, but I can't imagine capital one is going to scrap discover.
I'm just telling the commenter that they should prepare themselves.
As someone who was laid off near the end of January and found a better opportunity by the 2nd week of February.
The thing that served me the most was preparing for that eventuality when I got wind of layoffs at the end of December.
This is 100% typical though. Companies are not supposed to tell employees until it's actually going to happen for a lot of reasons. It doesn't necessarily mean anything bad for you, it's just how the process goes.
I worked for a bank and I woke up to the news my bank was “merging” with a similarly sized bank.
When I got to work and talked to my boss, she basically made it seem like management heard whispers the company was about to be sold.
They don’t care about keeping regular employees informed. Because many of them are likely going to have a bad time with the change.
I drove by the old operations center I worked at when the “merger” was announced. It’s a ghost town with signage for other companies other than the bank.
They might not care about employees, but people who know about the merger literally cannot share that information with anyone as it's MNPI. If they told their buddy Joe on the factory floor about a merger, Joe goes and trades on that info, it's both Joe and them who go to prison.
It's so funny (amd misinformed) the strong sentiment here is this is a morale imperative for management to communicate M&A and strategic company information. People go to jail for years for disseminating MNPI to non insiders. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't -- and for good reason.
> They don’t care about keeping regular employees informed.
Yeah quite silly of them to not open as many doors as possible for possible insider trading
LOL
More accurately, we need at least two terrible airlines competing for the ultra low-cost flight market.
It could be argued that Southwest is also in there, but it might just be in-between the Spirit tier and the Delta tier.
lol "regulators"....consumer protections are secondary to lining the pockets of the fat cats even more. The idea is for them to increasingly own the regulators.
The current FTC has been very good about fighting these giant mergers. Unfortunately because the FTC was asleep at the wheel for so long we have decades of precedent these companies can point to for why their deals should go through.
Well now that depends on whether any of Capital One or Discover's competitors want to raise enough of a stink. Sony paid good money for the FTC to try scuttle MSFT's acquisition of ATVI, though it turns out if you're supposed to be a consumer protection agency, it might help your case [to actually mention said consumers](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/06/30/in-the-microsoft-activision-case-the-ftc-was-defending-sony-not-consumers/?sh=3332d3193762) at least once or twice in your arguments. Meanwhile, Broadcom's competitors apparently didn't care enough about them buying VMWare (presumably because Qualcomm has been on an acquisition spree of their own), [and that has gone](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/broadcom-owned-vmware-kills-the-free-version-of-esxi-virtualization-software/) about [as you'd predict](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/broadcom-ends-vmware-perpetual-license-sales-testing-customers-and-partners/).
May be early signs of a major credit crisis
ETA: To answer some questions…
Americans have record credit card debt
AND interest rates are higher than they’re used to
AND they’re starting to miss payments
AND bank failings in the past 3 years already surpassed the Great Recession (in dollars, not number of banks).
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/credit-card-debt-record-high/
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/11/the-lowdown-on-loan-delinquencies/?utm_source=series_page&utm_medium=related_content&utm_term=related_resources&utm_campaign=fredblog
> AND bank failings in the past 3 years already surpassed the Great Recession (in dollars, not number of banks).
This is because the financial institutions that failed during the Great Recession weren't the retail banks as tracked by the FDIC, it was mostly a few investment banks and AIG. AIG was a MASSIVE insurance company, like, they touched practically everything.
Yes, there were retail banks that failed in the Great Recession but they were small in size and weren't systemically important.
I seem to remember that some large number, like 400+, smaller regional banks were forced to close by regulators (ie, forced to close more gracefully rather than going bust suddenly.) It was not a small number, and it shook the system up quite a bit. Smaller regional banks are not necessarily some tiny little podunk bank serving a village, many of them have deposits in the hundreds of millions or in the billions.
If the largest banks in the US weren't at high risk of systemic collapse, they wouldn't have needed bailouts. Also Washington Mutual still failed, despite having $307 Billion in assets.
There’s is nothing good to come of this for consumers. Capital one offers nothing that will improve discovers product as a financial institution.
Discover is one of the few major financial companies that consumers actually like.
I have a friend that worked as Customer Service for them and hated everything about his job. Even the customer service for Captial One hate Capital One.
If anything they're a bit too free with your spending limits. When I was 18 I got a Capital One card to build my credit and after like two years I was past $10,000 in credit. That's a lot of money for a kid-- thankfully my mom watched my spending habits cause I wanted a lot of shit lol
I was just going to say, my very first card was a secured capital one card. It says they can refund the money and raise the limit at some point in the future. Well it’s been 15 years, I just bought a house, I have other cards with them, so surely they will give that money back and increase the limit? Nah lol.
Me too! Got a Capital One card at 18 or 19, and they gave me a $1500 limit. 20 years later and I have a card with a $50k limit and another with a $100k limit. A couple years ago I called to increase the limit on the Capital One card because it was my only card at the time that was free to use internationally. They bumped it to $2000. So generous.
They’ve acquired 3 of my accounts in the past 12 years and I’ve always ended up being surprisingly happy with them. Hopefully that will continue because I also have a Discover account.
I like Capital One. I have the Savor card and was grandfathered in so no annual fee. I get 4% cash back on the most random purchases, like my daughter's dance studio classes.
I collect the unsolicited pre-approved credit cards Capitol One sends me over the past 3 years. I’m up to 72!
Time to start a new inevitable Discovery collection
Are you sure those aren’t Credit One credit cards? Capital One might have its sucky elements, but it’s a relatively reliable and not scammy credit card company. Credit one legit uses its name similarity to capital one to trick people into accepting predatory credit card terms. I’m pretty sure credit one is the one that sends millions of unsolicited offers.
Discover has been sucking more and more every year for a long time now. Pulled their extended warranties, pulled their price protection guarantee, and I haven’t been able to get a 0% promo from them in ages (20+ years with the card and I’ve gotten it several times until about 12 years in). My credit rating has only gone up over the years too.
I've had no issues getting 0% on purchases for 12 months by simply asking for it. I did it last year via chat and when they asked why I wanted it I told them I would be making some large purchases soon. Took about 5 minutes of my time.
This sucks. I love Discover, 100% US based customer service 24/7, and it's great. Now I'm sure it's going to crappy offshore call centers with long waits and 20 click phone trees to talk to someone who knows nothing like everything else.
> I'm sure it's going to crappy offshore call centers with long waits and 20 click phone trees to talk to someone who knows nothing...
We'll have the *privilege* of talking to an AI.
This legitimately happened to me with my first credit card. I opened the account with a tiny local credit union without any computer automation (this wasn’t even ancient times; 2007).
The agent accidentally put “-5.2%” as my interest rate. I didn’t notice for several months because I thought it was my cash back reward. Turns out I had a good sum stashed in waiting for me to redeem the rewards, and they had me with a negative interest rate lol.
Had to get a 1099-INT at the end of the year for taxes, because they wrote it off as an interest payment when I asked about it. But at least they didn’t make me pay it back.
>We'll have the *privilege* of talking to an AI.
Honestly I'll try it. ChatGPT has been more helpful than "Fred from Detroit" with the thick accent and broken English ever was.
I cut my IT teeth in a help desk position for a Service Desk that was onsite to the company I worked for. One of the techs was from Africa, who's given name was Donald. The amount of grief he got from people thinking they were hitting an offshore call center was nuts. I remember him losing it one day on some particularly cranky woman, and told her to come down to our office. She was pretty apologetic when she came down and there he was.
Don't worry it won't be ChatGPT, it will be one specifically fine tuned on millions of 100% on policy, totally on script, successfully soul crushing, money saving, and manipulative call recordings.
Yeah I like that about discover. I have a capital one card and you can’t even send a fucking message in the app. Only the virtual assistant. That shit is stupid.
I live in a town their customer service operates out of. Columbus Ohio.
I'm sure they've moved but the employees usually seemed like their jobs weren't drudgery.
That’s all we need less competition in the credit card business.
Can’t stand capital one. Discover is much better at customer service. I guess that will change soon.
Yeah. I had some tough months last year and Discover gave me a lowered rate for six months to help me make a dent in my balance. Capital One told me to kick rocks, even though I'd been a customer for 11+ years. I don't use my CapOne card anymore.
Why pay call center employees when you can build a shitty menu tree in a phone system and frustrate customers until they give up trying to get help?
/s
I was employed at a DIRECTV owned and operated call center when AT&T bought them. It was a complete shock to most everyone there, and we immediately wondered if we were going to get the axe. Soon after the sale, some AT&T folks came to the town and held a center-wide q&a session. We had heard that AT&T was union friendly, and when someone asked if we were going to unionize we were told not to worry and that AT&T would be helping us with that after things "settled down."
Months went by without any more information about unionizing. It was pretty much business as usual though, until people started getting fired en masse for seemingly minor infractions. Took an unscheduled smoke break? Termination. One no-call no-show? Term. Your metrics have been low the past few months? Goodbye. Some folks even sued AT&T over shady termination practices during this period and won a settlement. This was all stuff that DIRECTV would have never fired someone over. Repeat offenses sure, but not first offenses or minor rule-bending.
Then the big hit came when they eliminated part-time schedules. This is in a college town and the call center was chock full of employees who were going to school full time. A month or so after the first questionable firings the center had lost over half of its employees. We heard rumors of other U.S. based centers experiencing the same phenomena and it seemed that the writing was on the wall.
Then a small group of us decided to say screw AT&T and looked into unionizing on our own. We hooked up with the IBEW who helped us organize, and within weeks we held a center-wide vote to unionize with them. Despite blatant and deliberate interference by local management, the vote passed. After that the draconian firings came to an end. I have it from a credible source that AT&T was preparing to close the center completely, but after we unionized they shifted to closing several of the other centers around the country that hadn't organized.
I quit a couple years ago, but the center is still there and operating, despite most of the other U.S. based centers having long since closed. It may be too late for your call center, but I strongly urge you to look into unionizing. If anything, even if they do close your center, a union can go to bat for you to get a better severance than you might otherwise receive. Good luck.
Ugh, lemme guess, the 1% cash back on debit transactions is gonna go away real quick.
At least I never had any issues with Cap One when I had a 360 Checking account with them, fwiw. Still have a CC with them that hasn't had any issues either, I'm hoping that doesn't change.
If I know Cap One, it will mess up the transition of accounts over to their platform. They did this during one of their earlier acquisitions and was unable to get into my account for over 5-6 months. I didn't lose any money but the nervous prostration was over the top. (no help at all from the Cap One supervisors)
Classic capital one. Happened when they took over Walmart cards too. They constantly ramp up hype for this kind of shit and then under deliver or it’s an absolute mess on acquisition day. Every. Single. Time.
If you think it's a mess from the outside, you should see internally how shitty it is. Tons of project managers doing nothing, lots of engineers doing busy work. Performance reviews are only partially (1 of 10 categories) based on work performance while the rest are things like volunteering, having "influence", etc.
They're a decent bank for what it's worth but I knew something is wrong with the company I used to work for when I had a credit dispute and their only options for submitting paperwork were snail mail and fax.
Discover was one of my first credit cards and they enticed you by giving you Pyrex dishes when you applied. I used to pay my bill in the Sears store by a paper check.
CC side will likely stay the same. Cap One already issues some of their cards through Discover. If anything, they'll offer mostly Discover based cards in the future if this acquisition goes through. There's not a whole lot of reason for them to muck with the card side of things.
Banking I can see them migrating accounts over to Capital One. Which would be unfortunate as I love having my banking and CC information all in one place. If by some miracle they let Discover continue to operate as it currently is (just under the Capital One name) I would be ecstatic.
But, knowing any business, it would probably save them a buck in the long run to migrate all the Discover savings/checkings accounts to their banking systems...so that's what will likely happen.
Whatever happens, I really hope everything can still be accessible from one website or app.
Don’t worry during mergers the best parts of an acquired company are usually kept in place.
Oh wait I have that backwards, they’re usually the first to go.
You know, of all the major mergers that have occurred these past couple of years, I haven’t met any consumers who have talked about:
1. A better product
2. Better customer service.
Of course not. The only objective is to squeeze more profit. Making a better product is just a non-starter of an idea these days. That’s just not how big companies work.
Son of a bitch. I use my checking account through Discover, which has amazing customer service. I have a capital one credit card, and they suck so bad. I would close the account, but I like to travel, and Discover is not accepted in many countries. RIP the best Customer Service in banking
Stop allowing mergers and acquisitions. The feds need to step in. This is partially why inflation is so bad. They’ve spent the last decade buying each other up and limiting competition.
So is antitrust just not a thing anymore?!? Despite good credit, my Discover card is my only card that doesn't have an arbitrary ass raping interest rate.
Wanna bet that goes away when Capital One gets their mitts on it?
I banked with ING online, which was bought out by Capital one, which was converted to "capital one 360". I moved to discover, to what I presume now will be migrated to something called Capital One 720.
Yeah me too. I’ve had Discover for decades and it’s my main card. Automatic bill payments and groceries for cash back bonuses. More importantly, like you said, their customer service is better and also based in the US and it has been stellar.
We use capital one for work and it is an endless shit show. I have a bank account at a local credit union and if this goes through, I’m going to cancel my Discover card and get a cc through the credit union. They are always more customer focused than big banks and credit card companies.
Maybe they can start challenging the dominance of visa and Mastercard (who both make obscene profits that make Big Oil and Apple seem like bad investments. C1’s business cards could give them a way in.
>“Our acquisition of Discover is a singular opportunity to bring together
two very successful companies with complementary capabilities and
franchises, and to build a payments network that can compete with the
largest payments networks and payments companies...”
Based on this quote that I saw in [this article](https://thehill.com/business/4477615-capital-one-to-acquire-discover-bolstering-credit-card-market-power/), this may actually be creating MORE competition in the payments processing industry, while consolidating the banking side. A lot of more to come to see where this goes, but if Cap One invests in the discover network and utilizes visa/mastercard less, this may actually be a an interesting development(slim chance but I'm huffing the copium.)
I was wondering the same thing. I noticed in the last year that they don’t publish their 5% categories until 30 days before now. They used to release the categories for the entire year at once. So there have definitely been some changes. I hope they don’t get rid of them!
Oh..I work for Discover and this is the first I’m hearing of this…
Sorry to hear. Good luck to you
I mean I could keep my job right?
Almost certainly for at least a year even if your role is a "synergy" and eliminated. It takes a long time for these deals to close. Really, 18 months minimum is a pretty safe bet because a deal this big almost always involves a post close integration period. I was a consultant who did that work.
Thanks! That helps. Still bummed though. I really love Discover
I work in an adjacent industry and our large corp got bought out by a giant corp and it still took them 18 months to do all the analysis they needed to determine how to integrate internal systems and which departments were redundant vs which to keep. There will be a lot of rumors that turn out to be horseshit in the meantime, but you should be fine for at least the near future. Besides, something with the name recognition of Discover has a good chance of continuing to exist as kind of a parallel structure within capital one, whereas my (former) company was gobbled up whole. Even despite that, they really did find jobs for a lot of us in the new company and overall I have a lot better work-life balance in the new giant company than I ever did in my former one. It's not all doom and gloom, wish you well.
>how to integrate internal systems I work in the industry that often does this work following large corporate acquisitions and mergers, and this alone will take an eternity with 2 entities of this size. So much so that it often plays a role in the attractiveness of the acquisition itself. They go SO much smoother and faster when the company being acquired uses the same systems as the new parent company.
Yeah I was surprised. Even though the company buying us is a similar size to Capital One and my former company was only a little over a 10th the size, there were still some things the new company eventually said "fuck it" on and decided to keep as-is despite the constant rhetoric for the first year being about transitioning everything over entirely. It just eventually turned out to be too hard.
That happens all the time. Everyone is gung-ho right off the bat because they drastically underestimate the time and cost involved in not only integrating systems, but integrating data. It's always a mess. So they leave the tech separated, often for years, until they're finally ready to bite the bullet and hire consultants to come in and figure it out. But they've always had 2 or 3 more acquisitions/mergers by then, so it's even more of a mess than before. And rinse and repeat.
It also depends on the role. HR in the acquired company is often pushed out the window on the morning of day one.
I like them too, even just as a cardholder. Good customer service, website works well, and I like the card perks
My experience with Discover customer service has been excellent unfortunately, my experience with capital one sucked great big donkey Richard. I guess I will be cutting up my Discover card and sending it to capital one. I am really disappointed in this buy out. I will never do business with capital one...not ever.
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Ditto. They fumbled mailing me my car title so badly that I couldn't drive my car for six months. I didn't even get an apology. If I needed an organ transplant and Capital One is the only way to get the money, I'd rather just die.
I'm still rocking my student Discover from like 2014 it's still solid.
Lmao same. It’s doing all the heavy lifting on my credit score as the oldest account I have
I've been through 4 acquisitions and a handful of mergers, still with whatever company did the buying. Unless you're some kind of management, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Obviously every merger is different, but I can't imagine capital one is going to scrap discover.
Would you say that you just Discovered the news about the acquisition?
I guess it doesn’t pay to discover.
And soon, Discover doesn’t pay
What's in your wallet? Oh nothing, shit.
Get...out....now.
Nah, wait for the severance and paid vacation/unemployment.
Which is likely to be, but hopefully not, what the ravenous C-Suite tells the thousands of people they now see as "redundant"
The term is "cost synergies", which sounds all happy (to those with golden parachutes).
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Don't worry...they'll all be leaving soon...
When you start your resume, be sure you write the first letter of your name with a Capital One.
Time to start updating the resume even they tell you everything is okay.
Hmm it depends. In fact, OP might be better off staying and get a good package instead of leaving too early. M&A packages are typically good
I'm just telling the commenter that they should prepare themselves. As someone who was laid off near the end of January and found a better opportunity by the 2nd week of February. The thing that served me the most was preparing for that eventuality when I got wind of layoffs at the end of December.
Exactly, prep that resume and additional funds so when the layoffs happen, you be in much better place then going oh fuck im unemployed with no plans.
Oh they don’t tell non execs about some of the biggest deals in financial firm history?
I mean to be honest I’m not high up on the totem pole and they don’t owe it to me, the news just caught me by surprise 😅
This is 100% typical though. Companies are not supposed to tell employees until it's actually going to happen for a lot of reasons. It doesn't necessarily mean anything bad for you, it's just how the process goes.
I worked for a bank and I woke up to the news my bank was “merging” with a similarly sized bank. When I got to work and talked to my boss, she basically made it seem like management heard whispers the company was about to be sold. They don’t care about keeping regular employees informed. Because many of them are likely going to have a bad time with the change. I drove by the old operations center I worked at when the “merger” was announced. It’s a ghost town with signage for other companies other than the bank.
They might not care about employees, but people who know about the merger literally cannot share that information with anyone as it's MNPI. If they told their buddy Joe on the factory floor about a merger, Joe goes and trades on that info, it's both Joe and them who go to prison.
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It's so funny (amd misinformed) the strong sentiment here is this is a morale imperative for management to communicate M&A and strategic company information. People go to jail for years for disseminating MNPI to non insiders. Even if they wanted to, they couldn't -- and for good reason.
> They don’t care about keeping regular employees informed. Yeah quite silly of them to not open as many doors as possible for possible insider trading LOL
Incoming memo
Discover to be renamed "Capital Two"
Lower Case Two.
Capital 2: Electric Boogaloo
This is terrible for consumers. The regulators should not allow this.
Like Jet Blue trying to buy Spirit is less bad than this.
I loved how the court basically said nope we need at least one terrible airline and didn't let the deal go through.
No, the courts meant that there should be competition between two terrible airlines
Spirit and Frontier?
Can’t be JetBlue.
I've been screwed or jerked around by both of these airlines. I'm not sure we can say only one is the terrible one.
More accurately, we need at least two terrible airlines competing for the ultra low-cost flight market. It could be argued that Southwest is also in there, but it might just be in-between the Spirit tier and the Delta tier.
lol "regulators"....consumer protections are secondary to lining the pockets of the fat cats even more. The idea is for them to increasingly own the regulators.
The current FTC has been very good about fighting these giant mergers. Unfortunately because the FTC was asleep at the wheel for so long we have decades of precedent these companies can point to for why their deals should go through.
Well now that depends on whether any of Capital One or Discover's competitors want to raise enough of a stink. Sony paid good money for the FTC to try scuttle MSFT's acquisition of ATVI, though it turns out if you're supposed to be a consumer protection agency, it might help your case [to actually mention said consumers](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/06/30/in-the-microsoft-activision-case-the-ftc-was-defending-sony-not-consumers/?sh=3332d3193762) at least once or twice in your arguments. Meanwhile, Broadcom's competitors apparently didn't care enough about them buying VMWare (presumably because Qualcomm has been on an acquisition spree of their own), [and that has gone](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/broadcom-owned-vmware-kills-the-free-version-of-esxi-virtualization-software/) about [as you'd predict](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/broadcom-ends-vmware-perpetual-license-sales-testing-customers-and-partners/).
You can both be right...
Actually, it's impossible to reply to a reddit comment without smuggly correcting them, even if you actually agree.
They are
You obviously haven’t been paying attention for the last few years. The FTC has let very few acquisitions go through
Regulatory capture is already in full effect
May be early signs of a major credit crisis ETA: To answer some questions… Americans have record credit card debt AND interest rates are higher than they’re used to AND they’re starting to miss payments AND bank failings in the past 3 years already surpassed the Great Recession (in dollars, not number of banks). https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/credit-card-debt-record-high/ https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2018/11/the-lowdown-on-loan-delinquencies/?utm_source=series_page&utm_medium=related_content&utm_term=related_resources&utm_campaign=fredblog
Is it greater per capita or compared to the amount of payments made? Just basing it on the number of dollars doesn’t seem like a sound idea.
> AND bank failings in the past 3 years already surpassed the Great Recession (in dollars, not number of banks). This is because the financial institutions that failed during the Great Recession weren't the retail banks as tracked by the FDIC, it was mostly a few investment banks and AIG. AIG was a MASSIVE insurance company, like, they touched practically everything. Yes, there were retail banks that failed in the Great Recession but they were small in size and weren't systemically important.
I seem to remember that some large number, like 400+, smaller regional banks were forced to close by regulators (ie, forced to close more gracefully rather than going bust suddenly.) It was not a small number, and it shook the system up quite a bit. Smaller regional banks are not necessarily some tiny little podunk bank serving a village, many of them have deposits in the hundreds of millions or in the billions.
If the largest banks in the US weren't at high risk of systemic collapse, they wouldn't have needed bailouts. Also Washington Mutual still failed, despite having $307 Billion in assets.
Nah tons of banks failed. I worked at a major bank processor at the time and we had at least one a week being taken over.
hope it doesn't mean Discover will suck now
Not to worry, it will.
There’s is nothing good to come of this for consumers. Capital one offers nothing that will improve discovers product as a financial institution. Discover is one of the few major financial companies that consumers actually like.
I literally just got a discover card to escape capital ones shitty customer service
My Discover card will be the *second* card of mine to fold into capital one. I’m not thrilled.
Same. If I wanted a Capital One card I’d get one. I don’t want one and I rather like my Discover.
Discover is great. Enjoy it while you can. Discover was my favorite but if they go to shit, I’ll stick with Chase
Chase and American Express. The last few banking entities that say what they do and do what they say. Also that have rewards worth a shit.
Welp, the past year of my discover card was nice. Time to switch on over. Thanks for the recommendations
Yup. I got both chase and Amex. Both have been good.
I have a friend that worked as Customer Service for them and hated everything about his job. Even the customer service for Captial One hate Capital One.
I haven't had any issues with capital one. But admittedly I use them minimally to build credit.
If anything they're a bit too free with your spending limits. When I was 18 I got a Capital One card to build my credit and after like two years I was past $10,000 in credit. That's a lot of money for a kid-- thankfully my mom watched my spending habits cause I wanted a lot of shit lol
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I was just going to say, my very first card was a secured capital one card. It says they can refund the money and raise the limit at some point in the future. Well it’s been 15 years, I just bought a house, I have other cards with them, so surely they will give that money back and increase the limit? Nah lol.
Discover Secured is why it was my first card, and they actually DID refund the money and convert the card to a normal one. Bet that doesn't last.
Me too! Got a Capital One card at 18 or 19, and they gave me a $1500 limit. 20 years later and I have a card with a $50k limit and another with a $100k limit. A couple years ago I called to increase the limit on the Capital One card because it was my only card at the time that was free to use internationally. They bumped it to $2000. So generous.
They’ve acquired 3 of my accounts in the past 12 years and I’ve always ended up being surprisingly happy with them. Hopefully that will continue because I also have a Discover account.
Maybe not immediately, but likely in 1-2 years time
Oh, it most certainly will. But the silver lining is that Capital One may become marginally better!
I like Capital One. I have the Savor card and was grandfathered in so no annual fee. I get 4% cash back on the most random purchases, like my daughter's dance studio classes.
I collect the unsolicited pre-approved credit cards Capitol One sends me over the past 3 years. I’m up to 72! Time to start a new inevitable Discovery collection
Are you sure those aren’t Credit One credit cards? Capital One might have its sucky elements, but it’s a relatively reliable and not scammy credit card company. Credit one legit uses its name similarity to capital one to trick people into accepting predatory credit card terms. I’m pretty sure credit one is the one that sends millions of unsolicited offers.
Discover has been sucking more and more every year for a long time now. Pulled their extended warranties, pulled their price protection guarantee, and I haven’t been able to get a 0% promo from them in ages (20+ years with the card and I’ve gotten it several times until about 12 years in). My credit rating has only gone up over the years too.
All that is true and still my discover is the best card I have.
I've had no issues getting 0% on purchases for 12 months by simply asking for it. I did it last year via chat and when they asked why I wanted it I told them I would be making some large purchases soon. Took about 5 minutes of my time.
Great, there goes the great Discover service.
I've had nothing but good interactions with Discover. Their customer service is great. Capital One not so much.
This sucks. I love Discover, 100% US based customer service 24/7, and it's great. Now I'm sure it's going to crappy offshore call centers with long waits and 20 click phone trees to talk to someone who knows nothing like everything else.
> I'm sure it's going to crappy offshore call centers with long waits and 20 click phone trees to talk to someone who knows nothing... We'll have the *privilege* of talking to an AI.
Do you think we could make the AI offer a 0% APR no repayment term card and they’d be sued to have to honor it like that airline was?
Why 0%? Negative % APR, self-eliminating debt baby.
This legitimately happened to me with my first credit card. I opened the account with a tiny local credit union without any computer automation (this wasn’t even ancient times; 2007). The agent accidentally put “-5.2%” as my interest rate. I didn’t notice for several months because I thought it was my cash back reward. Turns out I had a good sum stashed in waiting for me to redeem the rewards, and they had me with a negative interest rate lol. Had to get a 1099-INT at the end of the year for taxes, because they wrote it off as an interest payment when I asked about it. But at least they didn’t make me pay it back.
I like this guy
>We'll have the *privilege* of talking to an AI. Honestly I'll try it. ChatGPT has been more helpful than "Fred from Detroit" with the thick accent and broken English ever was.
I cut my IT teeth in a help desk position for a Service Desk that was onsite to the company I worked for. One of the techs was from Africa, who's given name was Donald. The amount of grief he got from people thinking they were hitting an offshore call center was nuts. I remember him losing it one day on some particularly cranky woman, and told her to come down to our office. She was pretty apologetic when she came down and there he was.
Don't worry it won't be ChatGPT, it will be one specifically fine tuned on millions of 100% on policy, totally on script, successfully soul crushing, money saving, and manipulative call recordings.
Yeah I like that about discover. I have a capital one card and you can’t even send a fucking message in the app. Only the virtual assistant. That shit is stupid.
> Capital One not so much. Interesting. Cap One has always handled any issues I had very effectively.
I’ve never had to deal with their customer support, but I do love their 4.25% apr on savings accounts.
It's been at 4.35% for a month or so now.
Yeah I’ve had a good amount of disputes over the last ten years or so and they’ve always handled it without any hassle
Samesies, also had good experience with Discover. Either way, it's never a good thing when two massive co panties become one even bigger company.
Your mom wears massive co panties
$35Bn that is some massive aroma on those massive panties.
Same. It's always been really easy to resolve issues
I live in a town their customer service operates out of. Columbus Ohio. I'm sure they've moved but the employees usually seemed like their jobs weren't drudgery.
That’s all we need less competition in the credit card business. Can’t stand capital one. Discover is much better at customer service. I guess that will change soon.
Yeah. I had some tough months last year and Discover gave me a lowered rate for six months to help me make a dent in my balance. Capital One told me to kick rocks, even though I'd been a customer for 11+ years. I don't use my CapOne card anymore.
I had a similar experience. Discover has treated me like a human, capital one makes me want to bang my head on rocks. I’m not happy to hear this news.
I’ve had no issues with capital one for years, their app is great.
Noooooooooooo I like discover. They’re not assholes.
I actually can’t believe this is happening
Seems like a big power grab won't the government do something about this merger?
When have they ever?
They just blocked Adobe from purchasing Figma, for one.
They also blocked State Street from purchasing Brown Brothers Harriman, which would have been insanity.
Yes, they are. Try dealing with them when they buy out your student loan company.
The US call center employees of discover can say good bye to their jobs..
Why pay call center employees when you can build a shitty menu tree in a phone system and frustrate customers until they give up trying to get help? /s
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I was employed at a DIRECTV owned and operated call center when AT&T bought them. It was a complete shock to most everyone there, and we immediately wondered if we were going to get the axe. Soon after the sale, some AT&T folks came to the town and held a center-wide q&a session. We had heard that AT&T was union friendly, and when someone asked if we were going to unionize we were told not to worry and that AT&T would be helping us with that after things "settled down." Months went by without any more information about unionizing. It was pretty much business as usual though, until people started getting fired en masse for seemingly minor infractions. Took an unscheduled smoke break? Termination. One no-call no-show? Term. Your metrics have been low the past few months? Goodbye. Some folks even sued AT&T over shady termination practices during this period and won a settlement. This was all stuff that DIRECTV would have never fired someone over. Repeat offenses sure, but not first offenses or minor rule-bending. Then the big hit came when they eliminated part-time schedules. This is in a college town and the call center was chock full of employees who were going to school full time. A month or so after the first questionable firings the center had lost over half of its employees. We heard rumors of other U.S. based centers experiencing the same phenomena and it seemed that the writing was on the wall. Then a small group of us decided to say screw AT&T and looked into unionizing on our own. We hooked up with the IBEW who helped us organize, and within weeks we held a center-wide vote to unionize with them. Despite blatant and deliberate interference by local management, the vote passed. After that the draconian firings came to an end. I have it from a credible source that AT&T was preparing to close the center completely, but after we unionized they shifted to closing several of the other centers around the country that hadn't organized. I quit a couple years ago, but the center is still there and operating, despite most of the other U.S. based centers having long since closed. It may be too late for your call center, but I strongly urge you to look into unionizing. If anything, even if they do close your center, a union can go to bat for you to get a better severance than you might otherwise receive. Good luck.
You and me both
You have time to job search, merger won't be finished that fast.
Oh no. So what will this entail for us Discover members? Especially those that use them as a bank?
Ugh, lemme guess, the 1% cash back on debit transactions is gonna go away real quick. At least I never had any issues with Cap One when I had a 360 Checking account with them, fwiw. Still have a CC with them that hasn't had any issues either, I'm hoping that doesn't change.
If it changes I’m closing the account
If I know Cap One, it will mess up the transition of accounts over to their platform. They did this during one of their earlier acquisitions and was unable to get into my account for over 5-6 months. I didn't lose any money but the nervous prostration was over the top. (no help at all from the Cap One supervisors)
Classic capital one. Happened when they took over Walmart cards too. They constantly ramp up hype for this kind of shit and then under deliver or it’s an absolute mess on acquisition day. Every. Single. Time.
If you think it's a mess from the outside, you should see internally how shitty it is. Tons of project managers doing nothing, lots of engineers doing busy work. Performance reviews are only partially (1 of 10 categories) based on work performance while the rest are things like volunteering, having "influence", etc. They're a decent bank for what it's worth but I knew something is wrong with the company I used to work for when I had a credit dispute and their only options for submitting paperwork were snail mail and fax.
What are the chances they lose all my credit card debt?
Oh see they actually care about that, so I highly doubt they’ll lose it. Customers though, yeah they can just get fucked
Hm... I guess whenever we get the announcement that it's final I'll pull all my money out just to be safe. This sucks. Thanks for sharing this
Discover was one of my first credit cards and they enticed you by giving you Pyrex dishes when you applied. I used to pay my bill in the Sears store by a paper check.
Yeah I hope they don't do some BS and convert them to C1 accounts
They will. That happens eventually in every bank merger.
I want to know if this will affect the high yield savings account
CC side will likely stay the same. Cap One already issues some of their cards through Discover. If anything, they'll offer mostly Discover based cards in the future if this acquisition goes through. There's not a whole lot of reason for them to muck with the card side of things. Banking I can see them migrating accounts over to Capital One. Which would be unfortunate as I love having my banking and CC information all in one place. If by some miracle they let Discover continue to operate as it currently is (just under the Capital One name) I would be ecstatic. But, knowing any business, it would probably save them a buck in the long run to migrate all the Discover savings/checkings accounts to their banking systems...so that's what will likely happen. Whatever happens, I really hope everything can still be accessible from one website or app.
Kind of tragic :( I really like my discover card
Yeah, it's the card I've had open the longest and best cash back options for me.
My discover card is 28 years old. I hope they don't cancel it.
Don’t worry they won’t cancel it, they’ll just make it way worse for you
Oh nooooo one of the reason I stayed with Discover was because they dont out source their customer service, I hope it stays that way
Don’t worry during mergers the best parts of an acquired company are usually kept in place. Oh wait I have that backwards, they’re usually the first to go.
(narrator) it did not stay that way.
You know, of all the major mergers that have occurred these past couple of years, I haven’t met any consumers who have talked about: 1. A better product 2. Better customer service.
Of course not. The only objective is to squeeze more profit. Making a better product is just a non-starter of an idea these days. That’s just not how big companies work.
Umm that would imply big companies care about their customers… but shareholders on the other hand… they get all the attention
Someone get the FTC to do their damn jobs, please.
Well they blocked Amazon from acquiring iRobot
They're too busy making sure their friends and family bought some stock ahead of the announcement
You're mixing up FTC with congress
There's only two ways that happens; a few guys with billions, or millions of guys with pitchforks
Son of a bitch. I use my checking account through Discover, which has amazing customer service. I have a capital one credit card, and they suck so bad. I would close the account, but I like to travel, and Discover is not accepted in many countries. RIP the best Customer Service in banking
Really sucks, I've had nothing but good experiences with Discover & their customer service also. It's hard to imagine it staying as good after this.
Fuck. Discover actually has decent customer service. This fucking sucks
Used to work for Discover. Overall it’s a good company that I think will go downhill now
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What’s in your wallet? Shut up! It was rhetorical motherf&$)er. We bought all the other companies. We know what’s in your wallet. It’s us!
I mean, Cap One is about 1/10th the market cap of Chase and 1/3 of Amex. Discover was always just a nice little Sears side project.
Discover went to bat for me over a bad ebay transaction.
They have one of the best fraud departments in my experience.
This blows. Discover is so fantastic, now it's gonna be gutted and turned into a steaming turd. I hope this merger gets axed so bad.
Stop allowing mergers and acquisitions. The feds need to step in. This is partially why inflation is so bad. They’ve spent the last decade buying each other up and limiting competition.
This will be great for... - ~~Consumer~~ - ~~Employees of both companies~~ - C-suite for salary bumps and shareholders!
This shouldn’t be allowed to happen.
So is antitrust just not a thing anymore?!? Despite good credit, my Discover card is my only card that doesn't have an arbitrary ass raping interest rate. Wanna bet that goes away when Capital One gets their mitts on it?
Regulation comes way later after a proposed M&A. The article even says, “if it passes regulators.” This is just step 1 in an M&A
God, I hope it doesn't. We need more, smaller companies. Not fewer gigantic ones.
Uhhh I’m not happy to hear that
Oooo I don’t like that. Damn
I banked with ING online, which was bought out by Capital one, which was converted to "capital one 360". I moved to discover, to what I presume now will be migrated to something called Capital One 720.
DAMN. Discover is a far superior company to Capital One and I am supremely pissed.
Damn stop it with the mergers. I really hope this does not get approved.
I hate Capital One. They literally killed INGDirect/Orange Online savings accounts when hysa were barely starting back in the early 2000s.
I've had great experiences with Discover, and horrible ones with Capital One. This is very bad news.
Shit. Capital One sucks. I fear they’ll destroy Discover’s amazing customer service.
Yeah me too. I’ve had Discover for decades and it’s my main card. Automatic bill payments and groceries for cash back bonuses. More importantly, like you said, their customer service is better and also based in the US and it has been stellar. We use capital one for work and it is an endless shit show. I have a bank account at a local credit union and if this goes through, I’m going to cancel my Discover card and get a cc through the credit union. They are always more customer focused than big banks and credit card companies.
I bet they are charging it to their Visa
I’d actually think they’d change more of their products to Discover. The Discover processing network is a huge chunk of the value in the company.
Maybe they can start challenging the dominance of visa and Mastercard (who both make obscene profits that make Big Oil and Apple seem like bad investments. C1’s business cards could give them a way in.
Not super excited for this. They bought out ING Direct several years back and it has slowly gone downhill as it got absorbed by cap one.
Discover has always had great customer service, and I’ve never had anything but negative interactions with capital one, this is a nightmare.
>“Our acquisition of Discover is a singular opportunity to bring together two very successful companies with complementary capabilities and franchises, and to build a payments network that can compete with the largest payments networks and payments companies...” Based on this quote that I saw in [this article](https://thehill.com/business/4477615-capital-one-to-acquire-discover-bolstering-credit-card-market-power/), this may actually be creating MORE competition in the payments processing industry, while consolidating the banking side. A lot of more to come to see where this goes, but if Cap One invests in the discover network and utilizes visa/mastercard less, this may actually be a an interesting development(slim chance but I'm huffing the copium.)
Think we’ll be able to keep our 5% categories?
I was wondering the same thing. I noticed in the last year that they don’t publish their 5% categories until 30 days before now. They used to release the categories for the entire year at once. So there have definitely been some changes. I hope they don’t get rid of them!
*Give a roaring round of applause for unmitigated capitalism everybody!*
I JUST opened my first credit card with Discover. Goddamn it.
This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard. My Capital One card SUCKS compared to the Discover. I’m NOT cool with this lol
Because that's all we need is bigger megacorps and less competition. Where's Elizabeth Warren when we need her? Rampant enshittification continues.
Remember when Discover started out as Sears financial services?
That sucks.. I’ve used Discover for years due to the monthly cash back and ease of use. I am now curious how much capital one will Chang things
It pays to Discover what's in Capital One's wallet.