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Discover is now part of Capital One
- the_optimist 1y agoCool. Great company, more competition among the payment networks should result in better and less expensive products. Maybe Discover will finally achieve its potential.
- IAmBroom 1y ago> "more competition among the payment networks" The exact opposite of what's happening.
- the_optimist 1y agoHow? The Discover network will be substantially better positioned to influence visa mastercard and amex, which are each expensive and oligopolistic. You know anything about this, or just spitballing here?
- toomuchtodo 1y agoAll payment roads eventually lead to FedNow instant payments. https://fintechtakes.com/articles/2025-03-25/the-pay-by-bank-breakthrough/ https://fintechtakes.com/articles/2025-03-25/the-pay-by-bank... https://20392958.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/20392958/Whitepaper%20-%20US/matera-pix-by-the-numbers-q4-2024.pdf https://20392958.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/203929... (page 4 specifically) (work at a fintech, thoughts and opinions my own)
- josefritzishere 1y ago[flagged]
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoOur regulatory bodies at this point are simply a fig-leaf, a performance of accountability for too-big-to-fail corporations. Oh sure they hand out a fine here or there. Nothing substantial, certainly nothing that will change the behavior of business. America is a gerontocracy giving birth to a corporatocracy.
- jedbrooke 1y ago“NOTICE: The FTC website is currently unavailable. Thank you for your patience while we work to restore service.” oops, even the government is susceptible to the hug of death
- baq 1y ago[flagged]
- DaSHacka 1y agoThis administration causes webservers to be over capacity?
- buildsjets 1y agoIf they have deliberately or incompetently underfunded them, yes.
- baggachipz 1y agoIt does if they decommission most of them in the name of "efficiency". You may recall the same thing happening to Twitter at the behest of its new owner, who happens to be the new owner here as well.
- baq 1y agoabsolutely. defund, then shut down due to bad performance is the play, webservers included.
- gruez 1y agoWorks fine for me.
- hiatus 1y agoThat's not Capital One being fined but the CEO himself.
- colechristensen 1y agoFining the CEO for not filing the correct paperwork when acquiring large amounts of company stock doesn't really seem like it should block a merger.
- josefritzishere 1y ago[flagged]
- colechristensen 1y ago>The complaint alleges that Fairbank failed to report his sizable stock windfall to federal antitrust authorities and illegally finalized the acquisition before the agencies could investigate. He got $20M worth of shares of Capital One stock which is overall worth $76B, so yeah, I'm quite dismissive of the crime of not following antitrust regulations for a transaction involving 0.03% of company value. The authorities were never going to have anything to say about these transactions, they're just mad they didn't get the opportunity to choose to not do anything. Sure, fine him, but this is like a parking ticket.
- gruez 1y ago...because the process started over a year ago, and just got regulatory approval last month? I'm not sure what you're expecting here. Unless that enforcement action specifically barred them from acquiring companies, why should they be prevented from acquiring companies? It's like asking why someone who was fined for speeding could still drive, when license suspension wasn't part of their punishment. >Capital One announced in February 2024 that it had agreed to acquire Discover Financial in an all-stock deal worth $35.3 billion.[94] >[...] The deal was approved by U.S. banking regulators in April 2025.[99]
- digdugdirk 1y agoI was wondering when the questionable corporate consolidation would start kicking off under the Trump administration. Have there been any other mergers in the past few months that slipped under the media radar? I honestly expected there would have been some deals waiting in the wings prior to the election just in case.
- mindslight 1y agoThree major online-first banks was clearly just way too much competition. This merger fixes the situation down to the "token two" where they only have to compete on marketing rather than anything relating to actual features like product offerings, fees, website usability, customer service, etc. Now they can switch to shameless extraction mode like the regional and national brick-and-mortar banks.
- lxgr 1y agoWhich one is the other one?
- mindslight 1y agoAlly. There's also Alliant Credit Union which I left out because I think their website/app usability is abjectly atrocious (and my statement was still technically correct because CU). Admittedly I haven't kept up with new options in the past few years, but my main goal is stability for not having to redo all the setup so new startupy options are kind of inherently uninteresting.
- xyst 1y ago"Questionable corporate consolidation" has been happening for decades. I do agree it will accelerate under this current orange administration. Anti-trust laws have been watered down so much or not applied. This is all because of pseudoscience from neoclassical/neoliberal/reaganomics economic theory
- gruez 1y ago
- christophilus 1y agoI know nothing. But this is an interesting acquisition. Capital One strikes me as a pretty well run org. Why would they want Discover, who notoriously targets the low end of credit card custom? My guess is that this gives them the ability to increase margins by owning the entire payment layer all the way through distribution. If they slash the fees charged to merchants, this could make them quite a powerhouse.
- datadrivenangel 1y agoCompeting with VISA and the others is their goal here.
- Boogie_Man 1y agoThis is the correct answer. Discover has a payment network, which will afford Capital One the option to issue cards without relying on Visa or MasterCard. This is what Amex does. I would assume primarily domestic cards (platinum, quicksilver, savor) will start being issued on the discover network, while travel cards (venture series) will not (initially) because of the high domestic and low international acceptance rate of Discover cards.
- lxgr 1y agoDiscover acceptance abroad is actually not as bad as it might seem at a first glance: Discover owns Diners Club International, and as a result Discover cards are accepted everywhere Diners Club cards are and vice versa. They also have some mutual acceptance agreements with JCB and China UnionPay and others. Just because there's no explicit Discover logo on a terminal/restaurant window doesn't mean a Discover card will actually not work. It's not quite the reach of Visa or Mastercard, but international acceptance seems to be trending up.
- Boogie_Man 1y agoAgreed - The ability to further increase that international acceptance rate leveraging existing relationships and cardholder numbers is a large part of the 35.3 billion dollar gamble Cap1 is making, and I'm willing to bet it pays off big time. I'm riding high on Cap1, personally.
- rootsudo 1y agoWell, that kinds sucks.
- xyst 1y agoIt’s Ticketmaster and LiveNation all over again. Business owners going to get gouged. Customers going to see price of items go up as business owners pass along increased transaction costs. Yes - this will also impact you even if you don’t have a discover/capital one card.
- trollbridge 1y agoSoon you'll have to put up a "no Discover accepted" sign right next to the "Amex not accepted" sign.
- jldugger 1y agoI suspect the trick here is that capitalone issues so many other cards that once they standardize on it, merchants can't refuse their network without losing substantial amounts of business.
- JCattheATM 1y agoOr customers start bailing because no one accepts their cards and the whole thing backfires...
- greenavocado 1y agoWhat C1 has to do in the short-term is give customers a deal they cannot refuse to get them hooked. They can bag em and tag em later.
- Kon-Peki 1y agoDiscover has something like 150-200 different card designs that people can choose from, and they let you change them out almost as often as you want. You can even have more than one active at a time - perhaps keep one for your professional adulting wallet and another for your wild nightlife wallet. Better marketing around this would likely improve signups. I've had one in my wallet since college; it has never been a primary card for me. But I recently needed to choose a new one and scrolled through the options on my phone. From the small photos, I chose something that looked like some sort of abstract painting. When it came in the mail, I realized that it was not a painting at all. It was way more interesting than I had imagined. And indeed, it is the only credit card I've ever had that has received compliments. Does that influence how often I pull it out of my wallet as opposed to the other cards in there? Perhaps...
- ravenstine 1y agoThough I don't know much about Capital One – I did have a credit card with them a long time ago, and I just remember their website/app being just OK. I do hope this merger doesn't degrade Discover since I've been very happy with them in pretty much every way (both bank and credit).
- hombre_fatal 1y agoUgh. Moving back to the US after a decade abroad, I had to get credit cards to rebuild my nonexistent credit. Discover and Capital One both had deposit-based credit cards for credit building, so that's what I started with. Discover's customer support system was polished and felt like a small company. I'd always speak to a polite native English speaker. When I gave authentication information to the pre-call robot (like card number, name, exp date), the customer service rep could pull up that info instead of asking me to repeat it. Also, my Discover card kept me up to date with it's upgrade status, eventually going from a $150 credit line to a $1500 automatically and predictably. And again going to a $2500 credit line without my intervention; just from making steady payments. Capital One's customer support system was awful. It's outsourced and I can't always understand the rep who sometimes gets mad at me for it. Any authentication information I give to the pre-call robot, the rep will ask me for again. Even the dang credit card number that is hard to give to a human. "No, that's Two as in Todd, Four as in Forage..." And the Capital One credit card I got 3 years ago is still at $150 credit line. Apparently I have to pester them to get the credit line upgrade that the card promises, but why bother with a crappy company when I have a $2500 Discover card and good enough credit to have gotten better cards since then? But I guess it's no surprise that the worse company to work with is swallowing the pleasant company. Just imagine all that money Discover was wasting by being a pleasant experience, like having credit lines that upgrade automatically and a customer support rep that speaks the same language.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- silisili 1y agoI really like Discover for the reasons you stated. It was my first CS experience where you called a number and a person just answered...imagine that. Similarly, I detest Capital One for a whole host of reasons. Just last month I was looking to switch banks, read great things about Discover, only to realize they'd be absorbed soon. Hard pass. I wish this deal were never approved. I can't see Discover going away, nor Capital One growing, as good things.
- the_sleaze_ 1y agoOpposite experience. I love Capital Ones interface, and their customer support is good. Usually I'll get a customer support agent state-side. > the rep who sometimes gets mad at me for it That's an ...unusual customer support experience. > my Discover card kept me up to date with it's upgrade status My capital one card does the same, it periodically requests updates to my income after which my credit line increases. The only friction I experience with Capital One is the lack of physical presences. There are none in my entire region. That being said it is a great bank that never - and I mean never - has played games with auto-pay suddenly and silently failing at the due date (and incurring a late fee of course oopsies), or other annoyances I've had with Discover.
- jimt1234 1y agoDumb question: Why are payment networks so difficult? My vague/naive assumption is it's because of complex banking/financial regulations and legacy banking systems. But honestly, from a technical perspective, I don't see it as so complicated. Anyone reading this could create a transactional system for "payments", open it to the public and scale it - basically, Venmo. The only major costs I can see are "infrastructure" and dealing with fraud. ???
- Firehawke 1y agoRegulation. The cost of regulation compliance and tracking that you're in full compliance, and the lawyers needed to keep all of that in line.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoI would imagine network effects are a pretty big barrier to entry.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tristor 1y agoThis feels weird to me. Capital One is an everyman's card company, where Discover was always a niche player for upper middle class people, primarily competing with American Express. I have a feeling that Capital One will degrade the Discover brand greatly, although in recent years they had been trying to move downmarket anyway.