Consumer complaint received 2025-10-09 00:00:00
Product: Credit card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem when making payments — Problem during payment process
Company: DISCOVER BANK
State: WV

Complaint narrative:
On XX/XX/year>, I submitted a payment online to pay a calculated amount greater than the minimum payment for my card. I have never missed a payment on this or any other cards, although I have had numerous issues related to Discover 's online services and their technical shortcomings. 
This will be the 5th time in the last 4 years with Discover that I have had to call in due to a payment being screwed up by discover or other banks. 
Discover 's online portal operates on the legal grey area of online digital payment. This includes making payments from 'saved ' bank accounts. In this case, as has been reported by numerous other consumers, the information saved under a nickname or alias bank account is incorrect. 

In my specific situation, the incorrect information, the information from an old bank account ( I have 3 accounts with the bank in question and 5 at other banks ) was retained and saved under the same alias, which was supposed to be my new account with the same bank. 
If I had known that discover had glitched and returned back to Account A when the alias was supposed to be for Account B, I would have transfered funds from Account B to account A to make the payments. This is 100 % Discovers glitchy online system that caused this mess and a return check charge. Who would transfer money out of the account they were preparing to make the payment from? 

There are XXXX considerations for the regulator and the bank that must be addressed : 1. Remove the return check charge that was the result of Discover retaining the incorrect bank account and routing number of an old bank account.

2. Require discover and all credit card issuers Regulated under the regulator to show the FULL ACCOUNT AND ROUTING NUMBERS for the account that the payment is being issued from if they are going to accept online payments. It is unacceptable that banks and credit card issuers are allowed to automatically remove saved bank account information without the consumers consent, and then when a new account with the same " nick name '' or digital alias is added in their place, the old bank information is used instead of the new information. There is no way that the consumer can tell if this has happened, because the account and routing number being used to make the payment is hidden under a nickname or alias, meaning at the time of submitting the payment, the actual account and routing number " on file '' can be assumed to be one thing by the consumer when old outdated information is actually on file. This violates my due process. When a credit card payment form arrives in the mail, a paper check must be included, issued by the bank, with the full account number printed on it. This way if a consumer has 3 separate accounts at the same bank, they can quickly visually confirm which account a check belongs to before using it. If the account and routing number or credit card information are to be entered onto the bill, the bill itself serves as a confirmation that the information is correct, as it can be easily cross-referenced with the customers copy of the same information entered. Digital one-time payments made from a 'saved account ' make the assumption that that saved account has been saved appropriately and with the correct information. In my case and many others, this was glitched in the online system.

3. Investigate an alternative to electronic checks for fee-free credit card payments. This suggestion is primarily for the regulator. I have unfortunately been forced to learn how electronic checks work over the last 5 years. And believe me, the endeavor has been far from riveting. Electronic checks have become the beating hart and cash cow of the modern online payment industry. The argument behind why a paper check takes days to weeks to clear rests on the fact that the physical check must be scanned and verified by an actual person at the issuing and depositing bank. Signature verification, check microprinting analysis and in many cases additional verification from the bank surrendering funds are all Investigated as standard banking procedure. Because of this it makes sense that checks may sit in a query until the next business day that someone at both banks is available to mutually verify the transfer and the document that initiates it. Electronic checks have no such security features. No signatures. No microprinting. And no need for human verification, excluding the case where the transaction is a high risk of being fraudulent. But where electronic checks win in convenience, they fail in functionality. In an age where computers operate and transact millions of transactions a second instantly, it seems awfully suspicious that the electronic version of a check should take as long as a paper check to clear. The vast majority of electronic checks never undergo any human review as long as they have been pre-screened electronically as a low risk of fraud. This system, which takes multiple business days to attempt a deposit of an electronic check, inherits all the failures of physical checks. Namely, that you don't know if a physical check will bounce until business days after it was written. You can typically guess if a check will clear based on the amount of money you have in your account and whether or not you withdrew funds before the check cleared. In the days of multiple subscriptions and bank cards being linked to the same bank accounts that electronic checks are taken from, this creates a sketchy dillema : the electronic check, a transaction that will incur the greatest fees of all transactions if declined, is last in line to get paid. If you write an electronic check on Monday, you could have multiple debit card subscriptions, bank fees, and other electronic checks that clear sooner, all hit your bank account balance before the original check attempts to debit on Friday. When a debit transaction is declined, you know instantly. But if a company takes 5 business days to process an electronic check, you won't figure out there was an issue with the account and routing number ( in my case ) or the account balance, until the payment is now late and a massive bounce check fee is assessed. Imagine id you had to pay {$30.00} to the store every time your debit card declines. The store would quickly get rich each time their glitchy point-of-sale system reads your card incorrectly, or you use a card that is connected to an account that unbeknownst to you, some subscription service has drained over night. This only adds the insult of fees to the injury of low funds. Perhaps this is why payment companies, Discover included, prefer electronic checks above all else. One solution is to use technologies like XXXX to pay bills. The payment leaves your account instantly, has no fees, and is immediately received by the billing company. Another solution is for banks to add a feature where you can place a certain amount of funds aside into escrow, to be used only for the purpose of paying a specific electronic check when it hits the account, preventing any other transactions from accidentally or intentionally draining the account below the level needed to clear the check. But this doesn't prevent against incorrect account information on the electronic check. The obvious solution to this issue is to provide electronic check users with an instant account and funds verification system that instantly verifies the account information with the issuing bank and confirms the funds are available to pay the check. Those funds are then put aside into an escrow fund to pay the check business days layer once it is cleared and verified. This would have prevented all the issues that arise in this case of mine with Discover, and benefit millions of consumers Nationwide. It would of course cost banks tens of millions of dollars in returned check fees that they earned for their own negligence and peddling a broken system from the late XXXX into XXXX which I would argue is a small price to pay for consumer protection and a better customer experience in the payment card and banking industries.

Company response to consumer: Closed with monetary relief