Synchrony Financial, the credit card issuer behind store cards for Amazon, Walmart and Lowe’s, is partnering with OpenAI to let shoppers complete purchases directly inside ChatGPT using those cards, according to CNBC.
The deal marks one of the first major efforts by a U.S. consumer lender to bring financing, payments and rewards into an AI chatbot, as the industry pushes toward what’s being called agentic commerce.
Currently, consumers who find a product through an AI agent are still routed to a retailer’s website to finish the transaction. OpenAI has been trying to change that, signing agreements with Visa and Stripe to enable in-chat purchases. The Synchrony partnership extends that push to store-branded credit.
Maran Nalluswami, Synchrony’s chief strategy officer, said the goal is to make sure the company’s cards are “loaded up in the right spots” so that when a transaction happens inside the AI ecosystem, it can be completed smoothly.
“What happens today is the transaction doesn’t cleanly happen yet at the provider like OpenAI,” Nalluswami told CNBC. “We want to ensure that if a transaction’s going to happen in that ecosystem, our cards are loaded up in the right spots to ensure that that transaction finishes.”
But there are hurdles before seamless agentic commerce becomes a reality. Nalluswami said work to get general-purpose cards into ChatGPT will likely take six to 12 months, while private-label store cards—which only work at specific retailers—could take longer because they require more coordination with individual brands.
Consumer caution remains another issue. Many shoppers are hesitant to hand credit card information to an AI agent or let it complete a purchase on their behalf. There’s also the question of who pays for transactions finished inside ChatGPT. Nalluswami said the economics will need to be worked out among retailers, Synchrony and OpenAI.
Synchrony isn’t limiting itself to OpenAI. Nalluswami said the company is also in talks with competing AI platforms, including Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, about embedding its cards within those chatbots.
The story is still developing, and more details may emerge as the partnership progresses.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/synchrony-openai-chatgpt-shopping.html
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