Consumer complaint received 2025-11-11 00:00:00
Product: Credit card — Store credit card
Issue: Problem when making payments — Problem during payment process
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL
State: TX

Complaint narrative:
To sum it up, Synchrony Bank does not provide readily available payment options to allocate payments to non-promotional/high-interest balances when the card has both zero-interest and high-interest balances on it. 

I made a large purchase at XXXX 's and took advantage of XXXX of their zero-interest promotions that required opening up a store credit card. The initial purchase was close to {$7400.00} and was subject to the zero-interest promotion. I immediately started making payments to get the balance down below {$7000.00} ahead of schedule and continued to make payments above the required amount using a combination of one-time payments and auto-pay that was setup to withdrawal more than they minimum amount on a monthly basis. 

To take advantage of some of the card 's rewards, I made several purchases that I would then pay off in full via one-time payments within XXXX days of the purchase. When I made those one-time payments, they were above the purchase price to ensure no interest would be accrued. 

I eventually found that I was still be charged interest. The large payments that I made, in addition to the scheduled auto-payments, were all going straight to the zero-interest balance. After seeing the first interest charge, I assumed I missed a small amount of the high-interest balance so I made another large one-time payment to remediate the issue. It wasn't until the following month that I saw another interest charge. I then noticed that my auto-pay payments were cancelled several times on the months where I made one-time payments. 

I eventually got in touch with their support team through a web chat and they said they weren't able to help. The rep told me, if I were to make a new one-time payment in the amount of the non-promotional balance ( somewhere around {$1700.00} at the time ), I would no longer pay interest. I wasn't happy with this, especially after paying more than {$2000.00} in extra payments to zero out the non-promotional balance, only to find it all went to the XXXX interest balance. I was told I needed to specifically request the payments be allocated to the high-interest balance. There were no options to do this on the website. 

I contacted a XXXX again today to see if they would be willing to make this right, pointing out that this was potentially a XXXX violation. She insisted that language could be found in an agreement somewhere and refused to help. I pointed out that there was no language on the site that made the cancellation of auto-pay payments clear, and that there were no options to change payment allocation on the payment page. She refused to help. 

Their payment process is clearly setup to prolong interest accruals, favoring payment of zero-interest balances over high-interest balances, even when payments are made far in excess of the payment due. The added step of sitting through an excessive phone queue ( today it took roughly XXXX minutes ) only further discourages consumers from making their payment apply as intended.

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