Synchrony, credit card issuer to Amazon and Walmart, partners with OpenAI for ChatGPT shopping

• SYF

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Synchrony Financial, the credit card issuer for brands including Amazon, Walmart and Lowe's, is working with OpenAI to allow shoppers to buy products directly inside ChatGPT using their store cards.

The deal is one of the first major moves by a U.S. consumer lender to bring financing, payments and rewards directly into an AI chatbot.

While agentic commerce has become a catchphrase for the next phase of online shopping, consumers who discover items in an AI agent are typically still routed to a brand's website to complete the purchase. To change that, OpenAI has signed deals with companies including Visa and Stripe to move toward in-chat purchases.

"What happens today is the transaction doesn't cleanly happen yet at the provider like OpenAI," said Maran Nalluswami, Synchrony's chief strategy officer, in an interview. "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."

Still, there's work ahead before the promise of agentic commerce becomes reality.

Nalluswami said doing the work to get general-purpose cards within ChatGPT will probably take six to 12 months, and possibly longer for private label store cards that only work at specific retailers, which takes additional coordination with the brands.

Consumers remain cautious about handing credit card information to AI or allowing an agent to complete a purchase. There are also questions about how to divvy up fees for purchases completed inside ChatGPT. Nalluswami said the economics will need to be negotiated among retailers, Synchrony and OpenAI.

Synchrony is also talking with competing AI platforms, including Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini, on embedding their cards within those chatbots, Nalluswami said.

Separately, Synchrony said it is launching a ChatGPT plugin that lets consumers browse its marketplace deals, promotional financing and partner offers and that it is deploying OpenAI's latest models internally to speed up product development.

The moves come as OpenAI prepares for its massive potential initial public offering, adding pressure on the company to turn ChatGPT into a broader platform for online commerce.