A little late, but I can confirm no HP for either my or DW's Discover checking accounts. I already had an old Discover Savers account that became a Discover Savings account linked to the checking.
Overall I like the checking product. I know it's just pennies, but I just like that fact that I'm earning 10¢ for each check I write, each billpay I make and each debit card transaction I do. For Nov-Dec, they upped the debit card cashback to 20¢ per transaction, which made me use the debit card a little bit more. Interest on the savings account is actually pretty good by today's standards. Transfers between the savings and checking accounts are instantaneous, which is really nice. And free checks is nice, though I only write about six checks a month.
On the downside, the Discover banking website seems to be down "for maintenance" much more than any other bank I do business with. Last month, I was unable to log into Discover banking for an entire week, which is pretty ridiculous.
Maybe common with other billpay options (never really had a reason to use it before), but billpays enter account activity when the payment clears. And there's no easy correlation between individual billpay initiations and their appearance on account activity or statement. So when I go to reconcile my account at the end of the month and I've entered 6 $50 bill pays into Quicken and there are 5 $50 transactions on the statement, there's no easy way to determine which ones to mark as cleared. I have to log into the site (if it happens to be working), click on each individual cleared billpay transaction to view the document image and try to make out the payee, then correlate that check # with the check # on the statement. It's a bit of a pain.
It would also be nice if they provided automatic pull from savings to cover an overdraft on the checking.
Even though the $50 offer didn't require a direct deposit, I set up a DD from my paycheck into my Discover checking after I opened it. When I set up DW's account, I didn't set up a DD. After about six months, they offered her a $25 bonus for establishing DD into her checking (which of course we're taking advantage of now). Makes me wish I had waited to set up DD for my checking account. YMMV.
Chris.
my favorite feature is the free incoming international wires as it saves me 12$ every months on each incoming wire compared to BofA ....very happy with Discover bank as I do not need fancy stuff just basic checking and bill pay
