Diners Club U.S. Ending Personal Cards Program?
 

I just got off the phone with Diners Club U.S. (spoke to someone in the U.S.; I asked to be sure I was not speaking to the Canadian side of BMO/Harris) and she told me that they were just informed yesterday by e-mail that they will no longer be offering personal cards in the U.S. Diners Club U.S. will become like the U.K. apparently, and issue only corporate cards.

I can't say I am surprised -- they've had them suspended for what, over four years now? But it is disappointing. I am going on vacation and will be renting a car for four or five days and would have liked to have the primary car rental insurance, and it is a chip-and-pin primary card. I think only Chase Bank (sapphire preferred, reserve and the united airline affiliated cards) offers primary car rental in the U.S. on their credit cards now -- on cards that cost less than $400 or so per year that is.

Anyway, this is just one customer service representative, and just one data point, but I thought I would post what I found out not ten minutes ago. I hope this is helpful, though it is a bit disappointing, even though it was what I had long expected. I had the original diners club card a long time ago before Citibank basically ruined it through neglect.

I wish they would bring back the Discover Escape card. That was a decent value for a reasonable cost.

Sigh. At long last.

Are you a current Diners Club holder?

No; I was once, as i said, but it was years ago, and before BMO Harris bought the card. I cancelled it reluctantly, but after years of fees and no improvements I got tired of waiting. I wouldn't have posted the word of one customer service representative except that she said that they had been formally notified in writing and was very certain about it. I also only inquired about new applications - I have no information as to what may or may not happen to existing card members. I just happened to call because I was interested in the car rental insurance.

I hope this helps.

FWIW, they didn't mention anything on my November 5th statement about ending the card nor have I received anything in the mail. I'll keep an eye out in case that happens, though.

But yeah, I doubt they'll ever bring back applications if they haven't done so over the last four years.

Nothing mentioned in the November statement that I just paid. I am wondering if they told the OP that BMO was not accepting new applications for personal DC cards, which they have not been doing in a while?

I mean, what the CSR told OP did sound specifically like the cards were going away, but who knows what could have gotten lost in translation.

In any case, there are other options if you do need specific functionality (Chase Sapphire Reserve for primary CDW, for example, and various cards listed here with PIN preference), but I'm not sure there's any other card out there that combine all of those features. And it could be argued that the PIN part is becoming less important with the rise of contactless/mobile payment, too, so it might not be worthwhile to bother with that specific feature depending on where you travel.

Excuse me, did they really mention the U.K., or is that just your comment after reading this forum? What exactly did they say?

If all they said is that they "will no longer be offering", that's bank speak for offering applications, not bank speak for discontinuing existing customers. Same for the term "issuing". But I'm not clear whether you are repeating word for word exactly what they said.

Furthermore, they're only been issuing corporate cards for a while.

But there are more cards that corporate and personal. Most of the non-corporate cards that got inherited from Citi for "professional" cards, which is a category between "personal" and "corporate".

And, btw, they've never issued professional cards since acquiring Diners Club North America from Citi (or even a while before that, Citi didn't issue them any more either). They only issued personal cards, apparently as an experiment, and didn't like the results of that experiment.

So it's not really news that BMO only plans to issue corporate Diners Club cards going forward. Most of us have suspected (if not known) that for years now.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that they plan to dump personal and/or professional card holders onto the sidewalk. If all they were talking about was the issuing of new cards, that's all they were talking about, and you shouldn't necessarily read anything more into it.

It was evident from the outset that BMO was primarily interesting in the Corporate accounts. The new element is that an agent said "never" rather than simply "not now". I think we would need additional reports to confirm that this is a genuine change in policy rather than a different way of answering a question. The website still says: Our Consumer card application is unavailable while we make improvements

I have not had or been able to get a Diners Club or Carte Blanche card since I had a Citi Diners Club card years ago. I did have a SunDiner's card and an Amoco Torch Club card which were both Diners' Club cards.

If they do not want to issue them, they should sell them to someone who does.

They still seem to be rolling out new features and updates so it's not like they fully gave up on the card. For instance, mine was replaced recently and the new one had the new MC logo (and the current contactless icon on the back instead of the old PayPass branding). Plus 3D Secure/"MC Identity Check" was added recently too.

Anyway, the economy is turning out to be poor enough that I'm not sure they'd be able to open to new apps even if they wanted to.

Very sad to see the demise of the once great Diner’s Club program. I suppose Discover will work just fine instead, but it is very sad to see the demise of this great institution.

I think Discover and the current DC card serve different purposes. In the case of the latter, it's supposed to be a card that's more oriented towards travel, with benefits and features that match with that.

That said, the current pandemic might drastically cut the amount of spending on the latter for a while and may trigger additional card cancellations. No idea if that will actually trigger the end of the card or cause them to eventually reopen apps, however.

What is also interesting is how the credit card world has moved on since the consumer cards were released. 3x grocery was a real outlier back in 2014. Today it isn't nearly so special. Citi Premier is 3x uncapped for grocery category and Amex PRG is 4x capped. We now have an uncapped 2x points everywhere card (Citi DC). There are a number of other cards that pay 2x or 3x or 5x in other categories that are useful. While 3x on grocery spend for transfer to AS would certainly be nice that is really the only thing I think I miss about the DC cards at this point.

The only stand out feature of BMO DC is offline chip-n-pin. Not so important now that Barclays and many CUs offer similar cards. I wonder why no financial institution will take it over and promo it?

If no other financial instution took it over before CV-19 hit, I can't see anyone considering taking it over it the next couple years, until travel gets up to close to pre-CV-19 levels (if ever*), given that DC is marketed as a "Travel & Entertainment" card.

Meanwhile, the unique feature of BMO DC to some is that it has offline PIN as the priority. Barclays offers offline PIN, but it's not the priority. Not every cares about that, though.

* If too many companies switch largely from travel meetings to virtual meetings permanently, that could redefine the appeal of Travel & Entertainment cards to banks for the long term. The foundation of Travel & Entertainment cards has been corporate travel.