Consumer complaint received 2026-04-07 00:00:00
Product: Credit card — Store credit card
Issue: Problem when making payments — Problem during payment process
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL
State: NY

Complaint narrative:
Unfair and Deceptive Payment Allocation Practices by Synchrony Bank I am filing this complaint to formally report an unfair, deceptive, and systematically abusive payment allocation practice by Synchrony Bank regarding their credit card accounts with multiple deferred-interest promotional balances. I currently hold a Synchrony credit card account that has multiple overlapping promotional purchases on it ( e.g., an older, higher-amount equal-payment promotion and multiple newer XXXX deferred interest promotions ). The newer promotions are for smaller amounts and will expire a year earlier than the older promotion. Synchrony 's payment system defaults to an internal allocation algorithm. Crucially, Synchrony deliberately provides no online tool or interface that allows consumers to manually route their excess payments to the promotional balance that will incur retroactive interest the soonest. To avoid thousands of dollars in retroactive interest, I am forced to call Synchrony Bank 's customer service every single month to manually override their system and direct my payment to the correct balance. To make matters worse, if a consumer does not get through to a representative soon enough after making a payment, Synchrony claims it will take 1 to 2 billing cycles for the re-allocation to take effect. This artificial delay further complicates a consumer 's ability to pay balances off in time and acts as another trap to ensure the promotion expires before the corrected payments are applied. This practice is inherently anti-consumer. The bank has the technological capability to calculate complex retroactive interest across multiple balances, yet chooses not to provide a simple online option for payment allocation. By designing an online portal that hides this functionality and forcing customers to navigate monthly phone calls ( complete with arbitrary processing delays ) to avoid penalties, Synchrony is intentionally creating an unreasonable barrier to success. This relies on consumer fatigue, mathematical errors, or simply forgetting to call, ensuring the bank profits from predatory retroactive interest. I am asking the regulatory body reviewing this complaint to investigate Synchrony Banks deliberate lack of transparent, consumer-facing online allocation tools and predatory default allocation logic, as it constitutes an unfair practice designed to trap consumers. Since Synchrony specializes in these sorts of promotions, they absolutely know how to allocate payments to best avoid interest. Payments should be applied first toward minimum payments, and then any additional amount should automatically be allocated toward the promotion that ends the soonest. Just this simple change would make it easier for consumers to increase payment amounts for additional purchases and remain on track for all promotions. It would be even better if they provided an online tool to choose how payments are allocated, but simply changing the auto-allocation algorithm to prioritize the earliest expiring promotion would solve this problem. It is also obviously the ethical thing to do for a bank specializing in deferred-interest promotional purchases.

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