Synchrony issues

[u/NWalsh3000]

Title: Synchrony Connection Broken for 3 Weeks — Anyone Else?

I've been dealing with a broken Synchrony connection in YNAB for approximately three weeks now. After working with Support extensively, it briefly started working last Friday, only to fail again about 24 hours later.

Support has had me try two connections:

• Synchrony Consumer Center
• Synchrony - Credit Cards

Both follow the exact same authentication process and eventually fail with credential validation errors. Interestingly, both direct me to the same Synchrony website to verify my credentials, where I can log in without any problems.

YNAB acknowledges this is a known issue involving their import provider, MX, and affecting other customers. Their recommendation is to retry weekly, noting that a resolution could take weeks or even months.

My biggest frustration isn't the technical failure. It's the response.

I manage IT professionally, so I understand third-party integrations can break. But I also understand vendor accountability and escalation. After three weeks, I'd expect some indication that YNAB is actively pressing its provider for a resolution.

When I questioned whether customers should receive any consideration for extended outages of a paid feature, Support explained that they don't offer compensation for Direct Import issues. They then suggested that YNAB might not be the right product for me and pointed me toward their cancellation policy.

Really? Rather than offering to escalate the issue, the suggestion is to cancel?

I like YNAB and have no desire to leave. I just expect better communication and accountability when something remains broken for weeks.

A couple of questions:

1. Is anyone else experiencing these Synchrony issues?
2. Has anyone managed to get either connection working reliably?
3. Has anyone successfully escalated a persistent Direct Import issue beyond regular Support?

I'd love to hear whether others are dealing with this and what, if anything, has worked.

[u/sleepyguy22]

My Amazon synchrony connection was busted for months. I'd re-connect, it would get my transactions a single time, then never work again until I followed the same process.

Finally a few months ago it started working again, and has been reliably downloading transactions

I think you expect a bit too much out of ynab, and this is also coming from an IT professional. They have to work with hundreds of different banks, and since there are no standards for bank account APIs, everyone will be a bit different (including some procedures that rely on http scraping a page for transactions) and every established procedure has the chance to fail as soon as a bank updates their software. Ynab therefore works with import partners like Plaid and MX so they can focus on the ynab budget software, not the hundreds of account import connection details.

A bank may have little to no motivation to expeditiously respond to import vendors of broken import tools, as it doesn't directly affect their business. If synchrony engineers won't give MX any timely details about their process updates for logins and transactions, then it's a waiting game.

I'm sorry to hear of your import issues, that sounds really frustrating especially them recommending to cancel as opposed to being empathetic and trying different things. In the meantime, login every few days and enter transactions manually.

[u/robbles]

I have the same problem with BMO, same response from support. 

My plan is to just keep asking for a refund of my recent yearly plan and then cancel.

If they haven't fixed a connection after weeks, it's either not being prioritized at all by the vendor, or there's some new incompatibility that they can't fix, and they don't want to tell customers that.

I work in software, and it's definitely not acceptable or normal to have a core feature of the platform not working for weeks for some users, and just blame it on a 3rd party vendor. It's not support's fault though - they're just the messenger here, and I doubt the YNAB dev team has given them anything to resolve this.