Chicos Mastercard Account Agreement and Pricing Addendum FINAL

Pricing in Synchrony Financial's Chicos Mastercard Account Agreement and Pricing Addendum FINAL agreement is expressed relative to the Prime Rate. This review treats those figures as margins, which is what they are, and compares the fee terms that can be compared.

What the document actually states

The document behind this page is Synchrony Financial's filed agreement for Chicos Mastercard Account Agreement and Pricing Addendum FINAL. The filing runs six pages, and It is issued on the Mastercard network.

The disclosure covers a penalty rate, an annual fee line, a late payment maximum and a grace period. A purchase rate, a cash advance rate and a balance transfer rate are not stated.

The disclosure table in this document parsed only moderately cleanly; the numbers are reported as read, with that caveat attached.

Margins, not APRs

What this agreement discloses is a set of margins added to the Prime Rate. Until Prime is supplied, none of these figures is an APR, and this page will not treat them as one.

The filing's margin figures come to 39.99 points for penalty pricing.

The practical consequence is that this card has no single disclosed price. The cost of carrying a balance moves whenever the Prime Rate moves, in lockstep and without notice, and no arithmetic on this page can tell you what it costs today.

The disclosure table in this document parsed only moderately cleanly; the numbers are reported as read, with that caveat attached.

The downside terms

The maximum late fee is $41 — roughly the 89th percentile of the late fee ceilings disclosed across this index.

Fees, and what triggers them

No annual fee appears in the filing, in line with the roughly 75% of disclosing agreements in this index that charge nothing to hold the card.

For cash advances the filing discloses a cash advance fee of $10 or 5% of the advance, whichever is greater.

The grace period

The filing gives 23 days' grace on purchases, meaning a statement balance paid in full within that window attracts no interest. That is shorter than the 25-day corpus median.

The $2 minimum interest charge means the effective cost of carrying a very small balance is far higher than the quoted APR implies.

Inside Synchrony Financial's filed lineup

There are 212 filings from Synchrony Financial in this index. Their disclosed purchase rates run from 0% to 34.99%, though this particular filing does not state one in comparable form.

What you cannot learn from the filing

This page cannot tell you a purchase rate, balance transfer terms and a foreign transaction fee, because the filing's disclosure table as read does not contain them.

What this analysis can address is bounded by the filing: rates, fees and the terms around them. Everything a card issuer might advertise — rewards, benefits, bonuses, who qualifies — falls outside the document and outside this review.

Go to the source

The filed PDF is linked from this page and runs six pages. It is the authority for every figure summarised above; where this page and the document disagree, the document is right.

In short

The honest summary is that this filing discloses a structure rather than a price. The margins are real and comparable to each other; the cost of borrowing is whatever Prime makes it.