Discovery Bank - where customer service goes to die

Please do yourself a favour and read the following facts about Discovery Bank's product and service offering before you decide to jump off the cliff and join them. I have been a customer for three months know and the following has been my experience.

GETTING HELP Getting help at Discovery Bank is almost impossible. You will need to be persistent to get through to their "24/7" customer support line, because even calling during the middle of the day, you are likely to hear "The subscriber you are trying to reach is not available". On two occasions I tried to reach customer support, and both times it required 4 or 5 calls before I eventually got through.

When you do get through, that is not the end. You then have to navigate a myriad of less than useful help options, often channeling you to a dead end where you need to give up and redo the whole exercise to see if another branch of this call tree will eventually lead to where you want to go.

"SKILLED" CONSULTANTS Assuming you successfully navigated this maze and end up with a person on the other end of the line, your woes are far from over. These consultants or bankers unfortunately do not have access to the necessary systems to help you. You will have to explain why you are calling, and they will then place you on hold for 5 to 10 mins, while you will hear over and over how sorry Discovery Bank is that you have to wait and that one of their "skilled consultants" will soon be with you, before they will come back, armed with the information that the facts as you explained to them are indeed accurate - "Yes, Mr XYZ, I can see that you did do the transfer this morning as you stated. I will now transfer you to my colleague to try to assist with your query of why these funds are not available for you to access." You will then be patched through to yet another of these "skilled consultants" and so on and so on.

SEND YOUR COMPLAINT HERE... JUST JOKING If you feel that your experience was less than satisfactory and you would like to lay a complaint, good luck with that. Under "Contact Us - Complaints", the Discovery Banking app directs you to call the same call center you have just suffered through or email them at ***. If like me, you cannot face another call center experience and send the email to the designated complaints address, you will receive the following response: "This mailbox deals specifically with existing complaints and resolving them". So Discovery Bank forces you back into the maize of their call menu, and good luck finding a "Complaints" option. It is very clear that Discovery makes it as hard as possible to log a complaint. The only way to do so is to reach a human again, one of those "skilled" consultants hamstrung by a lack of systems, and you can voice your complaint to them. Contrary to what the Discovery Bank app states, that appears to be the only way to log a complaint - via a consultant that you can only pray takes it down properly.

DISCOVERY HOME LOAN - BETTER NOT NEED THOSE FUNDS IN A HURRY If you are used to your online transactions clearing the same day, or at worst, the next day, then be warned. Even more importantly, if you are used to other banks where transfers between your own accounts happen instantaneously, you are in for an unpleasant surprise. You cannot make payments directly from your Discovery Home Loan, you first have to transfer funds from the home loan account to your transaction account. Whilst your home loan account will immediately show the additional money you, on which you will no doubt pay interest immediately, the funds in your Discovery transaction account will take at least 3 days to clear. So, you can transfer money and have it available in your Discovery transaction account from another bank, faster than you can access money from your Discovery Home loan account. And Discovery does not think this is an issue. In fact, good luck finding any mention of this in any of the loan documents you get before taking out the Discovery Home loan.

I transferred money from my Discovery Home loan in order to pay a beneficiary. When I tried to access the funds, it was not available. I spent 45 minutes on three separate phone calls to Discovery Bank, trying to find out why. I was transferred to at least 6 different people, none of whom could tell me why. So not only does Discovery Bank not tell you the client about an internal transfer taking at least 3 days to clear, their "skilled" consultants and their managers, from the bank to their home loan provider, are also not aware of this. It took my financial advisor, who is a top Discovery broker, to contact Discovery Bank management, before I received a call two hours later from them informing me that my funds will only be available after three days. And "management" was perfectly happy with that - did not think it was an issue at all.

Thank goodness for my broker who then took it further and eventually managed to free my funds a day later. Were it not for him, I would have been stuck on endless calls with consultants unaware that it was Discovery Bank policy to keep my funds hostage for three days while they charge me interest, and nowhere near getting access to those funds. I would have faced a stiff penalty on a late payment.

HOPE YOU LOVE TYPING ON YOUR PHONE If you need to set up new payment beneficiaries, then Discovery Bank also goes the extra mile to make that as difficult as possible - you can only do this on the phone app, not via an internet browser on your computer. So unless you are adept at switching between phone apps and copying and pasting between them, you are forced to type out all the account and reference numbers on your phone. Good luck with doing that for a long list of beneficiaries if you decided to switch to Discovery.