Thread: Is a Discover card hard to get?

Compared to credit cards from Bank of America, Citi, Capital One and similar is a Discover card hard to get? Their ads and color schemes are playful and I thought that meant they were easy to get. Then I read that a Discover card is harder to get than an American Express. Any truth to that statement?

I recently applied for an AMEX Blue Sky and Discover Miles card and I was denied from AMEX (after about 2 weeks) because "I wasn't an amex cardmember for long" (I got the AMEX green charge card a couple months prior), and because "I had too many hard pulls on my credit report". When I checked I only had 2 pulls, one was from AMEX themselves for the green charge card...Discover on the other hand took their sweet time (2 weeks) to contact me, and as I posted earlier in another board on this forum, they didnt approve me instantly because my household income (the income I gave them on the report) was different from my personal income...How they had that information I dont know, I never banked with Discover and this was my first card with them. Nonetheless they approved me for a generous credit limit 8,300 - at least in my opinion. FYI my credit score is ~735 and I have low balances on all my cards (some with no carried balance), no BK, 0 negative hits on my report, always on time payments, decent income and age on accounts. In short, from my experience, AMEX Credit Cards are harder to get than Discover, or any other CC for that matter, but hey, they obviously don't want my business so its their loss.

Originally Posted by Mogul of Pineapples

It really depends on the card. Overall I would say Discover is a bit harder and the only reason I say that is because the entry level AmEx charge cards are almost certainly easier to get than a Discover More, Miles or Escape.

The Blue used to be an easy one to get approved for but AmEx got burned pretty bad with those accounts during the recession, which isn't surprising since they were approving riskier applicants. Since then it almost seems as if Amex has went overboard in the opposite direction by making the requirements too stringent. There have been quite a few people post on here over the last year that have been denied, who like you, had a good history.

I applied for an Amex Zync (mostly because im young and have decent credit) i was instantly denied, Discover approved me for the More card with a 6500 dollar limit.

Maybe it was just me, but it seems like Amex is quite picky these days...idk.

Originally Posted by agp

Discover and CU cards are most people's first cards so they are not hard to get. But their starting CL is often low.

Would you call 6500 a low first card starting CL? Everyone i talk to says thats pretty substantial for a first card.

I know its nothing impressive by any means, when i grew up my dad had a combined CL of hundreds of thousands and killer credit score, but i think for 1 card and my very first at that 6500 isnt too bad lol