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Synchrony Financial's (SYF) Car Care Unit to Aid EV Owners

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Synchrony Financial’s (SYF - Free Report) Synchrony Car Care credit card can now be used for refilling electronic vehicles at charging stations.

This latest addition will facilitate car owners to use their cards for everything they need on the go, such as parking, car washes and rentals, tolls and ridesharing, auto insurance, among others. The list adds up to the more traditional requirements like parts and services, tires, gas, oil changes, etc. Per the U.S. Department of Energy, the United States has more than 45,000 public EV charging stations and about 115,000 charging ports.

While only a few thousand EVs were present in 2010, the number increased massively to more than 315,000 vehicles, sold annually from 2018 to 2020.
This move is rightly timed considering the popularity of EVs. In fact, President Joe Biden’s administration announced that it will pump $5 billion into creating a national electric vehicle charging network. EVs are being used by people for family vacations, local trips to the mall and so on.

This move is in line with SYF’s commitment to provide solutions for planned and sudden car expenses. Synchrony Car Care has been growing over the past few quarters as it widened its presence at in-store and online automotive merchants.

After Synchrony Financial rebranded CarCareONE as Synchrony Car Care in 2017, its business has witnessed a spike in merchant locations to more than 1,000,000 across the nation ever since.

SYF constantly made efforts to boost this business. To this end, Synchrony Financial introduced the no-annual-fee, zero-fraud liability credit card, which turned out to be a customer favorite by substantially widening its in-store and online automotive merchants network.

This business belongs to the Home & Auto segment, which accounted for $4.2 billion or 28% of SYF’s total interest and fees on loans for 2021. All these initiatives will likely boost Synchrony Financial’s business going forward.

Other factors, such as efficient management, strategic measures and a strong CareCredit Platform should help fuel overall growth.

Zacks Rank and Price Performance

Shares of this currently Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) player have lost 15.8% in the past year, wider than its industry’s decline of 5.2%. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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Stocks to Consider

Some better-ranked stocks in the finance space are Cantaloupe Inc. (CTLP - Free Report) , WEX Inc. (WEX - Free Report) and Virtu Financial, Inc. (VIRT - Free Report) . While VIRT and CTLP sport a Zacks Rank of 1, WEX carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) at present.

Cantaloupe is a software and payments company, providing end-to-end technology solutions for the unattended retail market. WU came up with a trailing four-quarter surprise of 108.3%, on average.

WEX is a leading provider of payment processing and business solutions across a wide spectrum of sectors, including fleet, travel and healthcare. WEX delivered a trailing four-quarter surprise of 9.96%, on average.

Virtu Financial is a market-leading financial services firm that leverages cutting-edge technology to provide execution services and data plus analytics and connectivity products to its clients as well as deliver liquidity to the global markets. Earnings of VIRT managed to beat estimates in three of its trailing four quarters (missing the mark in one), the average beat being 24.76%.
 

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