Consumer complaint received 2018-06-24
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL
State: MO
Product: Credit card or prepaid card
Sub-product: Store credit card
Issue: Fees or interest
Sub-issue: Problem with fees

Complaint:
I have a Care Credit Card through XXXX XXXX. My XXXX referred me to the promotion this card offers, which allows me to pay my XXXX bill over time without interest, in even payment amounts. The XXXX charge of {$2900.00} was made in XX/XX/XXXX with a 2 year promotional period, putting me at 24 payments of {$120.00} per month, which was affordable to me. I was paying the balance and everything was fine until XX/XX/XXXX. The due date for the payment was XX/XX/XXXX, which was a Sunday. I had set up an automatic payment on the XX/XX/XXXX of every month through my banking institution, since the due date was always on the XX/XX/XXXX. I later discovered that my bank delivered this payment of {$120.00} on the following business day, XX/XX/XXXX. This caused a late fee of {$38.00} to be applied to my XXXX XXXX   credit account, which I did not receive any notification about. Next month, once again I had an automatic payment made from my banking institution in the same amount of {$120.00} on XX/XX/XXXX and I was one again charged a late fee of {$38.00}. This payment was on time as the date did not fall on a Sunday. At the same time, I started receiving texts, emails, and phone calls from XXXX XXXX indicating I was late and payments were due. There were numerous phone calls, multiple a day to the point where it was harassing. After this occurred, I called XXXX XXXX and explained what happened and asked why am I being charged late fees when I'm making payments on time? I asked why are due dates that fall on a non-business day not adjusted to a business day? Since that due date is effectively not the real due date as banking institutions do not transfer funds then typically. I did not receive an answer. However, after speaking with the representative and a supervisor, I was able to have both late fees reversed, which took about 48 hours, during which time I STILL continued to receive phone calls from XXXX XXXX demanding payment. Finally, the late fees were reversed and everything appeared to be back to normal. In XX/XX/XXXX, once again, my bank sent an automatic payment of {$120.00} on XX/XX/XXXX, the due date, and once again I was charged a {$38.00} late fee and now a {$2.00} interest charge. I looked at my account and called XXXX XXXX yet again, this time very frustrated that this continues to happen when I am making on-time payments. The representative looked into the situation and indicated that I wasn't making the minimum payments, which were higher for the next month because of the addition of the late fees. For example : since the system charged me a late fee of {$38.00} and a {$2.00} interest charge in XX/XX/XXXX, my minimum payment was increased from {$120.00} to {$160.00}. Refunding the late fees does not lower my minimum payment back to the original amount and hence further promulgates this vicious cycle of late fees and interest charges to be applied to my account, regardless of payments being made on time. The proposed solution was to satisfy the system 's required minimum payment amount of {$160.00} in order for it to not charge me any more late fees. I can not believe this is something that can not be manually overridden by a human being. While I can definitely make that payment so this does not occur to me in the future, the whole purpose of this was budgeting and being able to have a consistent low monthly payment to pay off this XXXX bill. I believe this is a predatory practice, I consider myself to be somewhat savvy in regards to financial affairs and this took me 2 months to figure out, I can't imagine what could have happened if I was elderly or XXXX or did not speak XXXX very well. To be a large bank and not have the ability to monitor their accounts and have some sort of analytics in place to deter this from happening is just laziness in my opinion. I should not have to call a bank each time to have late fees reversed because of their systems ' lack of capability and then on top of that, have to pay higher monthly payments.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with monetary relief