Capital One announced Thursday that it is laying off 1,139 employees at the former Discover Financial headquarters in Riverwoods, Illinois, describing the elimination of nearly twelve hundred jobs as a “comprehensive” process that would be handled with “enhanced severance, benefits, and outplacement resources” and, per a company statement, “care.” The layoffs represent the second wave of cuts since Capital One completed its $35 billion acquisition of Discover last May, following an earlier round of 609 layoffs at the same facility, bringing the post-merger total to 1,748 employees who have been comprehensively cared for out of their positions. Capital One’s stock was up slightly on the news.

The company’s communications team described the layoffs in language so rigorously supportive that it was briefly unclear whether anyone had actually lost a job. “We are committed to treating our impacted colleagues with dignity and respect,” said a spokesperson, using the phrase “impacted colleagues” in a way that raised the question of what, precisely, a non-impacted colleague looks like in a merger integration context. Affected employees — all of whom had their jobs eliminated — will receive at least 60 days of notice, during which they will continue to technically be employees while also being aware that they are not, in a practical sense, employees in any durable way. Capital One described this period as “transition time,” which it is, in the way that most time is.

Of the 1,139 positions eliminated, 532 were based at the Riverwoods campus, 69 worked remotely within Illinois, and 538 worked remotely outside the state but reported to Riverwoods-based teams — a geographic distribution that the WARN Act filing with the state captured in granular detail, because the WARN Act requires it, and Capital One filed the WARN Act notice, which is what companies do when they eliminate 1,139 jobs. A Capital One representative confirmed that no front-line, customer-facing positions were eliminated, meaning that the people who answer the phone when you dispute a charge are still employed, while the people who structured the systems those people use are comprehensively transitioning. The distinction is noted.

Industry analysts who cover the credit card sector described the layoffs as “expected” and “consistent with post-merger integration timelines,” which is the financial press’s way of saying that this was always going to happen and the only question was when. The merger, announced in February 2024 and completed in May 2025, combined two of the largest credit card companies in the United States into one significantly larger credit card company with, now, a somewhat smaller workforce. The resulting entity will issue the same number of credit cards to the same cardholders, who will continue to pay the same interest rates, while fewer people process the backend operations that make this possible. Synergy, in this formulation, is another word for arithmetic.

The outplacement resources Capital One referenced in its statement are provided by a third-party career transition firm, which Capital One declined to name but described as “highly regarded.” The firm presumably offers services including résumé workshops, interview coaching, LinkedIn profile optimization, and personality assessments that tell laid-off credit card professionals that they are “explorers” or “strategists” and should consider roles in consulting or financial technology. A former Discover employee, who asked not to be named because they are currently in the 60-day transition period and would prefer not to appear in a newspaper, said the outplacement portal was “very portal-y.” They declined to elaborate.

Riverwoods, a suburb of about 3,700 people in Lake County whose primary civic claim is hosting one of the largest financial services campuses in Illinois, has now received two sets of WARN Act notices in less than a year. The village did not issue a statement Thursday. Local coffee shops near the Discover campus, which had already observed a drop in morning traffic following the first round of layoffs, were asked to comment on the second round and said, collectively, that they were hoping for the best. The owner of a sandwich place on Half Day Road, who has been making breakfast for Discover employees since 2007, said he wasn’t sure what to think. When asked if Capital One had provided him with a comprehensive transition resource, he said he didn’t know what that was. He was told it was probably a PDF.

Capital One’s statement noted that the merger integration is “proceeding according to plan,” which is either reassuring or not, depending on whether you consider the plan to be the good part or the thing that determined the plan. The company employs approximately 300 employees who will remain at the Riverwoods campus, down from a pre-merger workforce of several thousand. It will continue to operate the campus, which it acquired as part of the transaction, and which contains several buildings, a fitness center, and, presumably, a very large parking lot that is now primarily being used by 300 people. What the parking lot is experiencing is not covered in the WARN Act filing, but it is experiencing something, and one imagines that something is also, in its way, comprehensive.