Consumer complaint received 2020-06-20
Company: DISCOVER BANK
State: CO
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Other features, terms, or problems
Sub-issue: Problem with balance transfer

Complaint:
I'd like to file a complaint about the way Discover ( and likely other companies as well ) displays balance transfer information on their monthly statements. 

In this particular case, I have two balance transfers, one expiring in XX/XX/2020, and one expiring XX/XX/2020. 

My complaint is regarding how these transfers are displayed ( or in this case, NOT displayed ) when I log in to my account at www.discover.com. I can see my current balance ( {$2600.00} ), but I can't tell how much of that balance " belongs to '' the XXXX transfer and how much " belongs to '' the XXXX transfer. When I look at my current statement ( excerpt attached ), I can see the amount of those transfers which was subject to interest in the past month was {$3300.00} and {$620.00}, respectively. But obviously the total of those amounts exceeds my current balance since those totals do not reflect payments made. 

It seems that credit cards companies are being deliberately cagey about how payments were appliedthey could indicate on the statement, e.g., " {$530.00} of your payments were applied to your balance transfer expiring on XX/XX/2020 '' or something similar, but they do not, and therefore there is no way to know the respective remaining balances. 

So I reached out to Discover 's customer service via chat and asked them how to view the current balances of each transfer via their website. 

This was their response, verbatim : " Alright, so keep in mind the balance ( s ) disclosed is as of today and does not include interest, any pending charges and/or merchant refunds, and may not include other previous adjustments to your account balance. With that said though, your balance under the Promotional Balance Transfer rate of 0 % expiring on XX/XX/2020 is {$2000.00} and your Promotional Balance Transfer rate of 0 % expiring on XX/XX/2020 is {$620.00}. However you can not see this anywhere on your app or online profile, you would need to reach out to us for accurate balances for your balance transfers. Does this help out? '' The most important part of their response is " ... you can not see this anywhere on your app or online profile, you would need to reach out to us for accurate balances for your balance transfers. '' So they are admitting that there is no way for the consumer to know how much of each balance transfer remains at any given time. 

If their support people can see the exact balances, then it would be an easy matter for their website to display it as well, with the same disclaimers ( " does not include interest, any pending charges and/or merchant refunds, and may not include other previous adjustments to your account balance. '' ) And yet I suspect they choose NOT to display this info to keep the consumer in the dark about the actual amounts, making it difficult for the consumer to pay off the balance and avoid additional interest. Either the consumer has to overpay, to ensure covering it all, or risk underpaying and then paying high interest on the remaining balance, the exact amount of which remains a mystery.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation