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Capital One to buy Discover Financial in $35B stock deal
- fatkam 3y agoBank of America sucks, but at least their bill payment system is much better than Capital One's
- silexia 3y agoAntitrust help is badly needed here. I recently tried to open a new Capital One card despite having two very old high spend accounts that are always paid off and got denied twice. I have zero debt and millions in assets. The first time I was denied it was some TransUnion thing. The second time it was basically random. There is no person to call and reopen your case, you just have to start over from scratch and hope you mysteriously float through.
- finfrastrcuture 3y agoThis is a generally unsurprising event to industry, but exciting nevertheless. Cap One and Discover both focus on the nearprime / subprime / thin credit / credit invisible segments (think people who have bad credit, expats, students, etc.). Cap One is excellent in their analytics on understanding people, and likely sees Discover as an opportunity to acquire new customers + improve on Discover's operations. The network side of Discover's business is intriguing. Its nowhere near as sophisticated as Visa/Mastercard, but it is something! The idea may be to turn into an Amex focused on everything but prime consumers, and use the improved economics (from owning both sides of the transaction) to give rewards (at least something) to cardholders who don't normally see them. I doubt their intention is to build a serious competitor to the card networks.
- runamuck 3y agoI live in DC and friends who work for Capitol One call it "the Google of the east" because of putative tech savvy and innovation. Can anyone verify this claim?
- caslon 3y agoIt's not Google (Google isn't Google anymore), but if you search around for the winners of the intern competitions they hold every year, you'll find a surprising amount of intensely competent people who have done very interesting things in the years since.
- whalesalad 3y agoThey do a fair amount of FP/Clojure inside Capital One afaik.
- mdaniel 3y agoFWIW, the majority of the recently updated repos seem to be Python https://github.com/orgs/capitalone/repositories?type=all https://github.com/orgs/capitalone/repositories?type=all
- datavirtue 3y agoYou can also walk into a brand new project there that has business logic crammed into a towering, nested for/if spaghetti monster living forevermore in a spring controller method. True story. It just went into production.
- blovescoffee 3y agoI worked there for 1.5 years. There's lots of smart people. There's lots of people hiding in the bureaucracy of a large bank that get away with very little action. I haven't worked at Google so I can't comment on that. Overall it was a good experience but things moved very slow.
- nkotov 3y agoRed Ventures also calls itself "the Google of the east".
- abadpoli 3y agoThey’re a bank that likes to pretend they’re a tech company. In some ways, they’re right: they embrace a lot of “hard tech”, are all-in on things like cloud, and definitely value engineering skills which shows through their well-regarded program for new engineers. However at the end of the day, they’re also still a bank and suffer from the same bureaucracy and politics that every other bank does.
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoChalk up one more loss for market competition.
- gpapilion 3y agoI keep thinking this is a sign of a larger failure coming. The consolidation masks a financial problem at one or both of the companies.
- bediger4000 3y agoDiscover is a little predatory, very quick to throw accounts into collection. Capital One is a little scammy. This is a dynamite merger!
- MuffinFlavored 3y ago> The deal, which is expected to receive intense antitrust scrutiny, So... it is highly possible/more than likely it will not go through?
- lgleason 3y agoOne can hope. The novus network attempts to provide a semblance of competition to AMEX, Visa and Mastercard in the US.
- dev_daftly 3y agoHow would that change after this merger?
- MuffinFlavored 3y agoDo North American consumers/merchants pay less in processing fees overall than European/Asian counterparts or is it roughly 1-3% all over the world?
- csnover 3y agoAs far as I can tell, consumer interchange fees in the US are significantly higher than they are in Europe. The interchange fees for Visa and MC consumer products within the EEU are 0.2–0.3%[0][1], whereas in the US they are from 1–3%[2][3]. [0] https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/regional/ve/unitedkingdom/PDF/fees-and-interchange/intra-eea-interchange-october-2021.pdf https://www.visa.co.uk/dam/VCOM/regional/ve/unitedkingdom/PD... [1] https://www.mastercard.co.uk/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/eu/gb/Other/Website_Intra_EEA_Fallback_Interchange_Fees_220121.pdf https://www.mastercard.co.uk/content/dam/public/mastercardco... [2] https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/visa-usa-interchange-reimbursement-fees.pdf https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/vis... [3] https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/na/us/en/documents/merchant-rates-2022-2023-apr22-2022.pdf https://www.mastercard.us/content/dam/public/mastercardcom/n...
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- BadHumans 3y agoI've always heard Discover was a good company to work for and they had the best customer support. Capital One is the opposite of both of those things so I hope the government steps in here.
- op00to 3y agoAmex treats me far better than Discover.
- barkerja 3y agoI second this, but Discover is a very close second. I've been a very happy Amex user for better part of a decade now.
- 486sx33 3y ago+1 for Amex since 2007 A $60k limit, they never mess me around if I dispute a charge, a neat looking clear plastic card and a cute looking black card for my wife … 2-4% cash back (depending what you buy with it) .. we got a $1900 cash back credit last year Only downside was their built in travel insurance didn’t cover me rebooking a flight because the first airline gave me a refund when they cancelled at 3am with me and my family staying in a hotel room across the street from the airport for a 6am airport arrival Yes we got refunded but buying 4 tickets with a new airline the morning of our travel date cost me an additional $1800 over my refund. I guess there is no built in credit card insurance for that circumstance . (Screw you for leaving me stranded JetBlue!)
- NoPedantsThanks 3y agoOh yeah, AmEx, the company that detects fraud on your account, cancels it, and then DOESN'T NOTIFY YOU. So you start getting notifications from vendors that they canceled your orders right before Christmas, because of trouble with your card. When you call AmEx and ask why the fuck you weren't notified of fraud on your account, they say (and I quote): "Oh we don't do that. We wait for the customer to get in touch with us." The monumental stupidity and irresponsibility of this "policy" should be evident and disqualifying.
- kingtrippy5116 3y agoI immediately remember $DFS having a large student debt portfolio; not sure if its relevant
- lvl102 3y agoVisa and Mastercard and their highly anticompetitive tactics early in the network landgrab for the payment card space foretold what would happen in the tech space (that is to say do whatever you can to win the landgrab which is exactly what Google/FB did). DFS never caught on. Now the landscape has changed and this deal sort of serves as a bookend. People in fintech should go after the Visa/MC monopoly. There is no “network” and people are paying legacy fees just because it’s what they know.
- laylower 3y agoWhy are you not including amex in your point I am wondering?
- elevatedastalt 3y agoMy feeling is Google / FB have done nothing close to Visa / MC when it comes to landgrabbing, but I am open to information / arguments.
- lvl102 3y agoI actually think it’s worse because it’s not as natural of a monopoly as it was for the payment network space. Google and Meta actively created a duopoly in the ad space and at a global scale too.
- pasttense01 3y agoNo. For many of us it irrelevant if there is duopoly in the ad space because we don't use Facebook and we use ad-blockers. But in the payment space VISA/MC charge high fees which are passed onto all consumers.
- Kbelicius 3y ago> For many of us it irrelevant if there is duopoly in the ad space because we don't use Facebook and we use ad-blockers. But in the payment space VISA/MC charge high fees which are passed onto all consumers. Products that you buy have their marketing priced in. Even if you don't see the adds you are still paying for them.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39433109
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoI hope the government regulations don’t just end at stopping the merger, but also disallowing these financial institutes from banning users for speech they deem harmful. Actual illegal use, sure, but im not sure how or why it’s legal for them to ban and remove banking abilities from someone for their political views no matter how “abhorrent”.
- kmeisthax 3y agoIt's legal because the 1st Amendment is narrowly drafted to the point of uselessness. Censorship is only the result of actions by the sovereign - i.e. the local legitimate violence monopoly. Any other kind of monopoly? Sorry, that's actually just their freedom of association. And, ironically, their own freedom of speech: Comcast argued in front of courts that any sort of common carrier regulation on Internet traffic would be censoring Comcast. As for "abhorrent views", I'm of two minds. Many of those "abhorrent views" are themselves calls to commit censorship. I don't think political speech calling for censorship should be protected by the 1st Amendment, because of the chilling effects that speech causes, even if the law itself would be immediately invalidated by SCOTUS. On the other hand, having private actors make the final call on what speech is permissible is also wrong, because we have no judicial recourse should they make a mistake. But there's also a lot of very impermissible conduct - i.e. doxing, spam, etc - that should be illegal, isn't illegal, but is only held at bay because of intermediaries having unlimited censorship power over their own platforms. From the perspective of a court, bringing these platforms into the scope of the 1st Amendment would be a net negative.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoWell because these banks can only function from the money they borrow from the government, it’s insane they’re allowed to censor 1st amendment protected speech.
- missedthecue 3y agoI don't think banks borrow any money from the government, unless you're thinking of really convoluted things like the department of agriculture partially insuring equipment loans to farmers against default. That's not borrowing from the gov. and it's not even most banks though.
- BasilPH 3y agoAs a foreigner without a credit score, Discover was the easiest credit card to get started with. They made things easy and predictable and I love that you get cash back and not some points that you need to convert back to dollars. I hope they keep that spirit of being straightforward.