Who Founded Discover Financial Services?

Edward R. Telling (1919-2005) launched the Discover Card in 1985 while serving as the CEO of Sears. His audacious strategy was to bypass Visa and Mastercard entirely by creating a proprietary payment network, leveraging Sears' massive retail footprint (which, at the time, was the largest retailer in the world) to force merchants to accept the new card.

Edward Riggs Telling was born on April 1, 1919 in Danville, Illinois, and died on October 19, 2005. He was chairman and chief executive of Sears, Roebuck from 1978 to 1985 and led its expansion from retailing and insurance into financial services. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Ray Graham was the primary operational architect of the Discover Card launch in 1985. He heavily utilized the massive Sears consumer database to pre-approve 25 million customers for the card, and fiercely negotiated with independent merchants to accept the network by offering significantly lower interchange fees than Visa. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).