Discover’s Money Messenger Service Being Discontinued October 10th

Most people probably don’t care about this announcement since Discover’s cards aren’t particularly interesting from a frequent flyer perspective, but Discover’s peer-to-peer payments service called Money Messenger is being discontinued starting October 10th, 2013.

This service, powered by Paypal, was slightly interesting in that there were no fees for sending money, but you still earned the normal 1% cash back on the transactions. So essentially, you could make a couple bucks a month by just sending money to someone for free (my monthly limit was $500, so I could have earned an extra $5 a month). And this was even better when Discover would send out targeted spending bonuses, as sending money via Money Messenger counted toward minimum spending requirements.

For what it’s worth, I do have a Discover It card, although it’s infrequently used. I now mostly use it if the Discover portal offers a better cash back bonus than other online shopping portals and during the 5% rotating quarterly categories.