Most banks allow us to have credit cards and bank accounts in the same online account login. Discover used to only allow a signle credit card in a login, and your Discover bank login had to be separate as well. Around a year ago they started allowing us to merge, and for the past few days, Discover is now prompting everyone to link their logins together as one.
The system tracks your accounts based on SSN, I assume, and prompts you to merge the online logins by choosing one of the userID/password combo for both. This is true both for merging bank and cards, as well as merging your two Discover cards together.
I was having an odd time with my Discover account logins for a few days (random error messages for reasons I couldn’t figure out), then yesterday they popped up with the option to link logins. Since I did that, it’s been working fine.
With the logins merged, it takes an extra click to see your credit card details. Personally, I don’t really use my Discover checking/savings – got them a while back due to bonus and keep a few dollars there to keep the accounts live – so I actually prefer keeping them separate. I don’t recall now whether Discover forced me to merge the logins or if there was an option to keep it as before.
A couple of interesting pointers from the comments:
- Some people had their Discover accounts automatically merged
- Each Discover card gets it’s own Discover Deals offers even when they are combined in one login
- Some people mentioned that idea that Discover’s Cashback Match might somehow get messed up if you merge logins, so maybe keep them separate until the first year ends if you can. (For example, I can see this being an issue with getting Cashback Match on the referral bonus – which card did the referral? If it’s two logins, there will probably be two separate referral links.)
