What is SYNCB/PPC on my Credit Report?

Did you just look at your credit report and see SYNCB/PPC listed and have no idea what it is? Or maybe you were reviewing it on a site like Credit Karma and it jumped out at you because it looks weird and you don't recognize the acronym?

Don't worry – I have one too:

Totally normal – SYNCB/PPC stands for Synchrony Bank / Paypal Credit.

If you have a Paypal account and ever applied for or used their Paypal Credit product, they would've pinged your credit report with an inquiry and listed it as an active account. I may have inadvertently applied for it but I never used it, so the listing in my Transunion report is really short:

As you can see, it was opened on 10/2019 and always showed a balance of $0.

SYNCB is Synchrony Bank

If you see other listings that start with SYNCB, they're all for lines of credit affiliated with Synchrony Bank. They white label their financial services to other companies, such as PayPal, and so the credit reports will show their names first, followed by the partner.

The address shown on each listing will be for Synchrony Bank:
PO Box 965005
Orlando, FL 32896

Synchrony Bank is itself a subsidiary of Synchrony Financial, which is a publicly-traded company headquartered in Stamford, CT. Synchrony Bank is FDIC-insured (FDIC #27314) as a Savings Association but funny enough, not a single “branch” is located in Florida. That's because a lot of their partnerships are these white label scenarios and you often deal with the partner's customer service.

For example, SYNCB/CARE CREDIT or SYNCB/CARECR is CareCredit, a healthcare financing and medical credit card, that uses Synchrony Bank's financial services to offer their service. There are over a hundred different cards that use Synchrony Bank in this manner.

Will It Impact My Credit?

Yes – it's a line of credit so it's like any other line of credit. Any hard inquiry will impact your score, your payment behavior will impact your score, and having it open will affect your credit utilization and thus impact your score.

If you didn't apply for a card or it's an otherwise fraudulent request, you can get hard inquiries removed from your credit report.

I've never needed the PayPal Credit product but it's not a terrible one. It's very similar to a credit card in that you pay no interest if you pay off your balance in full each month. The current terms are you get a no-interest loan on purchases of $99 or more if you pay it off in six months. So if you use it just for $99+ purchases, you can get six months of free financing.

I personally am not interested in divvying up my spending that specifically but I must have accidentally applied for it when I logged in.

Should I Close It?

If you've already applied for and were extended credit, closing it will give you a temporary hit as you lose the line of credit but it'll subside pretty quickly. If you don't want an unused, very new, credit limit floating around then you should close it.

If you're comfortable with leaving it there, having the option to use it should you want the six month financing deal, keeping it open will not hurt your credit.

Can I Dispute It?

You can dispute anything – but should you? If you believe you accidentally applied for it – by all means dispute it. I don't know how PayPal will handle it but it's possible it could be removed completely because PayPal doesn't respond.

When I look at my CreditWise history, I don't notice a significant change over the last year (when this account was opened) so I didn't feel a need to mess with it.

Check Your Credit Reports

This just highlights the importance of reviewing your credit reports.

Because of Covid-19, you can request your credit report once a week from AnnualCreditReport.com until April 2021.

In normal times, I use the Waterfall Method to check my reports but using free credit score tools can be a nice canary in the coal mine test too.

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