Discover eliminates fees on bank accounts
Discover is doing away with fees of any kind on its checking, savings, money market and certificate of deposit accounts.
The move would be a first for a large bank and comes as smaller online fintechs offer no-fee options and highyield savings to woo younger and more price-conscious Americans.
Going forward, Discover won’t charge fees for monthly maintenance, checkbook orders, replacement debit cards, insufficient funds, excessive withdrawals, falling below minimum balances and stop-payment requests.
The change will affect the bank’s 1 million customers who have a Discover deposit account and comes after the bank piloted a program that forgave the first fee a customer incurred.
“What we keep hearing resoundingly – and not just from millennials and Gen Z – is that there’s been a fundamental change in how people think about fees,” said Arijit Roy, vice president of deposits at Discover. “They create a very negative emotion, so we thought we take the next step to eliminate all fees.”
No-fee checking
The average fee banks charge to maintain a checking account is $13.58 per month, or $162.96 a year, according to a February MoneyRates.com survey. The percentage of checking accounts without monthly fees dipped to 30.40%, down from 31.78% six months ago, the survey also found.
Online banks are more likely to offer free checking.
Almost two-thirds of online checking accounts have no monthly fees compared with just a quarter of traditional, branch-based accounts. When online checking accounts charge monthly maintenance fees, they are often lower than those charged by branch-based accounts, MoneyRates found.