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Discover It Card: Followup and reviews

The Discover It card launched late in 2012 (I wrote about it earlier).

When it first came out there was a heavy promotion of the card via multiple channels. They had tv videos and articles were written about it

One of the most interesting things to me about the card is the design on the front of the card:

Discover it card design

It's so basic and they moved the numbers/expiration etc. to the back of the card. Here's a video showing an unboxing of the Discover it card:

You can see at 4 minutes into the video as he shows the card the front is just plain and simple. A very clean design!

Here were the items he described during unboxing the card:

  • No annual fee
  • No late fee (only affects credit cards)
  • No foreign transaction fee
  • Paying late won't increase APR
  • 1% cashback on most purchases, 5% rewards program for certain purchases
  • Talked to a real person within 3 minutes of calling the company
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New Discover Credit Card Design: Metallic front, details on back

Various news outlets are covering the release of the new Discover credit card, like Daily Finance.com.

Discover Card Design

And, here is the card design:

Discover it card design

It's interesting how they have completely broken from the standard way of lots of information on the front of the card. It's a really clean design with just their Discover logo/wordmark and a little orange "it" on the top right edge. The name, number, and all the other junk is on the back of the card. I haven't been able to find the design of the back of the card anywhere. Apparently the new card will be sent via expedited mail, getting it to customers in just a couple days instead of the industry standard "3-5 business days."

Their delivery box is not only going to get to you faster, it's attractive too:

Discover it delivery box

Commercials: Support and better features

Discover also has several new ads to go along with the card. This first one emphasizes the human, America-based support that is someone so friendly you might just call them for fun:

And this second one emphasizes the "no change to APR for your first late payment" while still giving the human, America-based, friendly support:

Drawbacks to Discover

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Is Wal-Mart replacing Green Dot with American Express for Prepaid debit cards?

There's lots of news coverage today that Wal-Mart is partnering with American Express to offer prepaid debit cards in their stores. Wal-Mart previously offered Wal-Mart branded Visas via a partnership with Green Dot. American Express is accepted less widely than Visa, so it seems likely that Wal-Mart will want to continue offering a Visa or Mastercard either with Green Dot or someone else. On the other hand...since Wal-Mart accepts American Express they might see this as a feature: it means people will choose them if another merchant doesn't accept AmEx.

Press covreage of prepaid expansion by Amex

Amex/Walmart deal affects GreenDot shares

In trading on Monday, shares of Wal-Mart (WMT) and American Express (AXP) were largely unchaged while Green Dot was down about 20%. Investors have been watching closely to see whether Wal-Mart will renew their current agreement with Green Dot which is set to expire at the end of 2012.

Fees for the Bluebird debit card

According to a reuters article:

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Easy MCC - Merchant Classification Codes in XLS, CSV, ODS formats

As I work on CARD.com we are considering how to leverage Merchant Classification Codes (MCC) data for a variety of purposes. It will be helpful to better understand our customers, to give our customers more information about their transactions so they can know who is using their card (for example, a few weeks ago I got a transaction from "TSI Inc." but by digging into the MCC I was able to see it was for gas and that reminded me of which gas station it was).

These codes are used on every single credit and debit card transaction to identify the nature of the business. This is helpful for accounting, tax reporting, and can even allow for some pretty interesting analysis like the Brighter Planet mastercard app that assigned a carbon footprint to debit card transactions based, in part, on MCC values.

Unfortunately, MCC values are mostly available in formats that are incomplete and hard to parse.

Sources of MCC Data

A new source: Merchant Category codes on Github

So, I created a github repository of mcc values. The data is available as

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