Synchrony Financial wants you to shop through ChatGPT. The credit card company behind your Amazon Store Card and your Walmart credit line just partnered with OpenAI to let an AI chatbot handle your payments. Maran Nalluswami, their chief strategy officer, says it'll take six to twelve months to get this running.
Six to twelve months. That's how long it takes to plug a payment processor into a chatbot that already exists. Revolutionary.
The pitch goes like this. You ask ChatGPT what lawn mower to buy. ChatGPT tells you. Then ChatGPT charges your Synchrony card right there in the chat window. No browser tabs. No second thoughts. No moment where you remember you already own a lawn mower and your yard is three hundred square feet of crabgrass.
This is what progress looks like now. An AI that hallucinates legal advice and makes up medical studies will soon have direct access to your credit limit. Synchrony looked at that feature set and thought yeah, let's tie our payment rails to this thing. What could possibly justify a twelve-month delay.
Retail traders who couldn't figure out why their Robinhood account went negative will now get to explain to customer service why ChatGPT bought them four KitchenAid mixers and a pallet of protein powder. The chatbot misunderstood the prompt. No, there is no undo button. Yes, the APR is twenty-nine percent.
Synchrony stock exists. It trades under the ticker SYF. The company makes money when people carry balances and pay interest. Now they're building infrastructure to let an AI rack up charges without the friction of you stopping to think. Turns out asking are you sure one more time was killing conversion rates.
Nalluswami gets paid to call this strategy.
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