Synchrony, a consumer finance company, recently announced an enterprise partnership with OpenAI, allowing consumers to use its "retailer-specific credit cards" directly within ChatGPT to purchase products. Synchrony is the issuer of exclusive credit cards for brands such as Amazon, Walmart, and Lowe's. This collaboration aims to integrate lending, rewards, and loyalty programs into AI-native shopping and checkout experiences.

Media analysis points out that this is a significant move by U.S. consumer credit institutions to directly introduce loans, payments, and reward mechanisms into AI chatbots. For OpenAI, this helps expand ChatGPT from a conversational tool into a broader online commerce platform.

"Agentic commerce" has become a popular concept for the next phase of online shopping, but currently, after discovering products in AI agents, consumers are usually directed to brand websites to complete purchases. To change this situation, OpenAI has previously partnered with companies like Visa and Stripe to promote transactions directly within chat interfaces.

Maran Nalluswami, Chief Strategy Officer of Synchrony, said: "Currently, transactions cannot be smoothly completed on platforms like OpenAI. We want to ensure that if transactions occur within this ecosystem, our credit cards can be loaded in the right place to ensure the transaction is ultimately completed."

However, the vision of "agentic commerce" still has a long way to go before it becomes a reality. Nalluswami revealed that it may take 6 to 12 months, or even longer, to enable general credit cards to connect with ChatGPT. For exclusive brand credit cards that can only be used at specific retailers, the timeline could be even longer, as it also requires coordination with relevant brands.

Consumers remain cautious about providing credit card information to AI or allowing AI agents to make purchases on their behalf. Additionally, there are questions about the fee distribution mechanism after completing transactions within ChatGPT. Nalluswami said that retailers, Synchrony, and OpenAI need to negotiate the related business models. He also revealed that the company is discussing with other AI platforms such as Claude and Gemini, hoping to embed its credit cards into these chatbots.

In addition to payment partnerships, Synchrony will launch a ChatGPT plugin that allows consumers to browse discounted products, promotional financing options, and offers provided by its partners. At the same time, Synchrony will deploy OpenAI's latest model internally to accelerate product development.