Consumer complaint received 2025-11-14 00:00:00
Product: Credit card — Store credit card
Issue: Problem when making payments — Problem during payment process
Company: CITIBANK, N.A.
State: LA

Complaint narrative:
Beginning between XXXX and XX/XX/year>, CitiBank changed how Deferred Interest Promotions on the Best Buy Credit Card operate. This change has made it extremely difficult and time-consuming to correctly allocate payments toward promotional balances and avoid deferred interest charges. 

Previously, customers could log in to the CitiBank/Best Buy credit card website and directly allocate excess or additional payments to specific Deferred Interest Promotion balances. This process took less than three minutes, required no employee interaction, and allowed customers to ensure their promotional balances were being paid down correctly.

Now, CitiBank has removed this functionality and requires customers to follow an unnecessarily burdensome monthly process in order to allocate payments : 1. Customers must look up a special phone number to request a payment allocation change.

2. The caller must navigate two separate AI voice-response menu trees, each with lengthy disclosures and menu options that take several minutes to complete. These menus do not allow a customer to make the allocation electronically ; they block access until a live representative is reached.

3. After finally reaching an employee, the customer must request the allocation verbally, listen to repeated disclosures, and then be transferred to a second employee, who again performs identity verification and repeats the same disclosures before starting the allocation.

4. During the process, the customer receives two separate text-message disclosures. Each directs the customer to a website to read and agree to terms. These must be completed sequentiallythey can not be done at the same time.

5. This entire allocation process must be repeated every month after each payment posts. CitiBank allows a repeating monthly allocation, but the amounts can not be edited, and any change requires repeating this full process again.

6. Completing this process via telephone takes XXXX minutes each month, compared to under 3 minutes with the original website-based allocation feature. 

Without a manual allocation, CitiBanks default payment allocation places Deferred Interest Promotion balances last, meaning they are not paid until all other balances are brought to zero. The phone system states that promotional balances will be paid automatically when fewer than 60 days remain before the deferred-interest deadline ; however, my experience has shown this does not occur in practice. If I do not manually allocate payments and then verify on the following statement, deferred interest is improperly charged despite timely payments. 

This change forces customers into an inconvenient, time-consuming process that appears designed to make it harder to pay off Deferred Interest Promotions before interest is charged. Removing the online allocation tool constitutes a significant degradation of service and increases the likelihood of unexpected and unfair interest charges.

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 explanation