Discover Bank / Discover Financial Services review: cash back checking

Discover in general has always been a " name brand " company. It's always had the best service, and touts it's amazing features, which is true, if you have a credit card with them. This however, is not true if you decide to move your family fortune over to the banking side, like I did. Over the past year I've had everything from not being able to spend my money, to transactions being processed months, and months late. Let me go over a long list of problems that I've encountered, hopefully to help you guys with making the best outcome possible.

I opened my account in July of 2015, and immediately I was overrun with a slew of problems. I had about 20k to move over to my new discover bank, of course, with them being an online only bank, the only way to do this was to A, send them a check with my life savings ( no thanks ), or B, mobile check deposit, okay, cool, I opted for mobile check deposit. Unfortunately, they had tons of limitations, you could only deposit 1500 a day, because I was a " new customer ", even though I've had a Discover credit card since 2010, that apparently didnt' matter to them, i'm still a new customer. None the less, I continued onward. Then I found out that the waiting period for new customers was two weeks, so my money was basically " unavailable " for quite a while. Reluctantly, I continued onward once again.

October 2015 I started noticing that transactions were missing on my account, my balances were constantly wrong, and they were charging me for charges that were actually charged weeks earlier. I contacted them, and they seemed quite concerned, about 2 weeks later, a major update wen't on so they could fix the problem. After the major update on the system things were even worse, transactions were still missing, and my account was still being treated like a credit card.

December of 2015 they decided that another update was needed, only this time they did not notify us. It's important to note that when they do scheduled maintenance, your daily spending limit is only 250 USD, and they like to do them just about every weekend, if you don't spend that kind of cash then you have nothing to worry about, if you do, make sure you have alternative means of paying for things, because they will tell you to use another bank, that's the Discover way.

In January of 2016 I called to have a debit freeze put onto my account, this basically a way to stop money from going out, but let money come in, I did this because of fraud on my account. They happily added the freeze to the account. However, their system screwed up about a week in, and they un froze the account, allowed more fraud to go through, took money out of my account, I then had to call them to dispute more charges, which was the entire point of having the freeze on the account, that makes no sense, but again, this is the discover way.

On valentines day weekend, they setup another scheduled maintenance. Mind you, when maintenance is going on, daily spending is limited to 250 dollars, valentines day is one of the busiest days of the year for consumer spending. I called and complained, and they again told me to use another bank. They then, that same week had more maintenance on Thursday night, they said it was scheduled, but later admitted it wasn't, then they again had maintenance on Saturday night ( what a good night to limit our spending ), I called, they said to use another bank. Finally, the following sunday I took my card out to make a purchase, and it was declined. I called the bank, and they told me I had to wait until Monday if I wanted to get it resolved, and if I needed to spend money, I needed to use another bank. No compassion, no understanding, just " use another bank ", or " alternative means ". If you have all of your money with discover bank, be very very careful, their banking side is very, very, very new to the industry. Their website is still in " BETA ", and they do not offer any of the basic services of their competitors that have brick and motor strores.