Turns out Discovery Bank is every bit as poor as all the bad press they get

So, it turns out Discovery Bank (DB) is every bit as poor as all the bad press they get on social media - I am now experiencing it first-hand. For months I resisted their enticements to switch over until I was forced to a few weeks ago.

Where to start? Let me start here. A few months ago, after DB migrated the old Discovery Cards onto their own platform I noticed that they had swopped the primary and secondary cardholders, being my wife and I. I called them, and asked them to rectify this, which they said they would, and I thought nothing further of it. How they managed to mess this up nobody knows. Of course they didn't in fact rectify this, and it has now come back to bite me.

Fast forward a few months. My wife misplaced her purse, so I made use of the handy 'Pause' function via the DB website. When we couldn't find the card, we decided to cancel the card, which to my knowledge is common parlance for when you have lost a bank card. So I went onto the DB website again, and clicked on 'Cancel', in my haste not noticing that there was also a 'Replace' option. This was a grave mistake of mine. Even the most basic user-experience principles would require a confirmation step from the user at this point, as cancelling actually means completely cancelling the cardholder from the account. Turns out on the DB app there is exactly such a confirmation step, which also explains what you are about to do and suggests that perhaps you were actually intending to replace, not cancel. But on the DB website, you click the 'Cancel' button, and that's it.

Since I needed a new card for my wife I decided to rather call in. At this point I was told that as I had cancelled the card, it could not be replaced via the Call Center, and I had to now join DB and request a new card via the app. I was not happy to be forced to switch to DB, so I asked for a supervisor to call me. A supervisor then did call me, and apologised, but explained that there was no other way. So, I reluctantly went through the process of 'Join the Bank' via the app, and the supervisor talked me through the steps to request a new card for my wife. All seemed ok, except that she was surprised I hadn't been asked to confirm the delivery address. Nevertheless, even though the requested new card did not show in the 'Cards' section on the app, the supervisor was confident everything was ok, and that it would probably update overnight. To be sure, she offered to check the next day, and call me back. Needless to say, I'm still waiting for that call.

Having not received any call, and still not seeing my wife's replacement card on the app, I tried to request a new card again. I got an error, saying that there was already a request in process. So I called in to the Call Center. Ayanda answered the call, and even though I asked her to check on her system who the supervisor was who had dealt with me and to ask her to call me, Ayanda offered that she was sure she could help me. She was friendly and seemed knowledgeable, and she determined that my wife now also needed to download the app and 'Join the Bank' to complete the reuest. So, we went through that laborious process, but when Ayanda checked on her side, the reason we still couldn't complete the replacement request was because the system was looking for a primary card and couldn't find it. But my card was on the system! Ayanda said she would check with her backend team and get back to me. Later that day she called me back, and explained that the problem was that my wife was now the primary cardholder, and not me (remember, the DB migration stuff-up!). She said we'd have to cancel everything and start again. At this point I lost it. Poor Ayanda copped all the flack for DB's ineptitude. She calmly listened to my tirade, to her credit. I said there was no way I would go through that whole process again, and that she must get a supervisor or manager to call me and that DB must sort out their mess through the back-end. Well, that was on Wed. It' now Fri, and I am still waiting.