Synchrony Financial, which issues store credit cards for Amazon, Walmart and Lowe’s, is working with OpenAI so shoppers can buy inside ChatGPT using those cards. Its chief strategy officer says general-purpose cards will take six to twelve months and store-specific cards longer.

Synchrony Financial wants its cards inside ChatGPT. The issuer behind store cards for Amazon, Walmart and Lowe’s is working with OpenAI so shoppers can complete purchases in the chat window rather than being sent to a retailer’s website.

None of it is close. Getting general-purpose cards working inside ChatGPT will take six to twelve months, according to chief strategy officer Maran Nalluswami, and private label store cards will take longer because each retailer has to be brought in separately.

The problem being solved is real enough. “What happens today is the transaction doesn’t cleanly happen yet at the provider like OpenAI,” Nalluswami said, describing a desire to ensure Synchrony’s cards are “loaded up in the right spots” when the moment comes.

This is a familiar shape by now. Two hotel groups moved into ChatGPT earlier this year and neither would let you pay there either.

OpenAI has been assembling the pieces regardless, signing deals with Stripe and putting Visa into ChatGPT for agent-initiated payments.

Synchrony is not betting on one platform. It is in talks with Anthropic and Google about embedding its cards in Claude and Gemini, in a market where Amazon has also been pushing Alexa into the same territory.

The unresolved question is who gets paid. Nobody has agreed how fees from a purchase completed inside ChatGPT should be divided between the retailer, the issuer and OpenAI, and Nalluswami says that has to be negotiated.

Demand is not obviously waiting either. Consumers remain wary of handing card details to an AI system or letting software finish a purchase on their behalf.

In Europe the obstacle is legal rather than commercial. Agentic payments still fall under PSD2 and its strong customer authentication rules, which were written on the assumption that a person authorises a specific payee, a specific amount and a specific moment.

That is awkward for a product whose entire pitch is that you do not have to be there. There is no separate regime for agentic payments in Europe and no supervisory guidance yet, which leaves the question of whether a customer authorised this purchase or merely delegated the ability to make purchases.

Get the TNW newsletter

Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.