Resolving disputed transactions is one of the biggest headaches in payments.

Verifi’s landmark 2022 study, The Chargebacks Triangle, described dispute resolution as “the industry’s $31 billion-dollar problem”, noting that three-quarters of disputed transactions end up being resolved by banks and cost more than $9.8 billion annually in the US and UK alone.

After COVID-19, organisations of all kinds are reporting an increase in disputed transactions, making the need for process improvements more acute.

While the current wave of digitalisation and automation has gone some way to improve matters for banks, merchants and consumers, all too often these improvements deal with automating internal bank processes for dispute handling, rather than focusing on the consumer experience.

The dispute resolution process needs to improve if merchant and bank profitability are to be protected. In what follows, we argue that banks must focus more on user experience and customer satisfaction in dispute management and resolution.