The news: Capital One will issue T-Mobile’s first credit card, according to Bloomberg—but it won’t run on Capital One’s recently acquired Discover network.

The card has no annual fee and will offer 2% back in T-Mobile rewards. Cardholders enrolled in autopay will also get $5 off their monthly phone bill.

How we got here: This is Capital One’s first new credit card since it acquired Discover Financial Services in May.

CEO Richard Fairbank said Discover would accelerate Capital One’s “quest” to be the top credit card company, giving it greater resources to offer better debit and credit card products. It’s not exactly a vote of confidence that its newest credit card doesn’t take advantage of its new network.

In all likelihood, the talks with T-Mobile began well before the Capital One-Discover deal closed—but probably not so far back as before the deal was announced in February 2024. (An image of the card—with Capital One branding—leaked in April 2025.)

Capital One said that it wanted to start the migration to the Discover network with its debit cards, so maybe the issuer didn’t want to complicate that by adding in a new credit card to the mix. Or, it’s possible T-Mobile wasn’t interested in a card that didn’t run on Visa or Mastercard, at least initially.

EMARKETER reached out to both companies for comment.

What this means for networks: Whether T-Mobile snubbed Discover or Capital One wasn’t ready to integrate its credit card products with the newly acquired network, the optics of running a new card on Visa aren’t great. But Visa and Mastercard shouldn’t exactly call this a win.

Capital One said it will finish moving its debit cards to Discover by early 2026. After that, it’s only a matter of time before it starts migrating credit cards. We forecast Discover’s consumer network card transaction value growth will more than double from 2025 to 2027. While its total volume is still an order of magnitude lower than that of Mastercard or Visa, those incremental gains will lead to real lost volume opportunities for the duopoly.