Mastering Dispute Management with Modern Solutions

Hey, GonzoBankers. Tony DeSanctis back with another hot take. We like to talk about leveraging our vendors for a lot of our solutions. Nobody does it better.

We’re going to talk a little bit about disputes and how to manage those most effectively. I’ve asked Lindsay Hooks, who’s in our payments practice, to join us. Lindsay has been deep into the disputes world, talking about and working with clients on what works.

So, Lindsay, one of the things I think you and I talked about when we were doing Payments School a couple of weeks ago is that disputes might be one of those things where we need to get our hands dirty a little bit and get into those ourselves.

I think so. I think there are some tools out there now that make this so much different than what we’ve been doing for so long.

For a long time, we’ve been using spreadsheets, or maybe configuring our own tool in-house, to try to track this. With the increase in fraud in the last few years, it’s too much, right? We’re trying to track friendly fraud. We’re trying to track what we call frequent flyers, new customers or new members who are coming in to test the waters to see, “How many times can I go out to lunch on my institution’s dime?”

Our friends at the card processing vendors have really come a long way in trying to develop tools that can solve this for us. The reality is, it’s just not comprehensive enough to solve all of the needs of the institution.

They’re going to keep you compliant, but we can’t have humans managing all of this in the back office. I really encourage institutions that have anywhere north of 20, 30 or 40 disputes a day to look at a tool that can automate the really simple decisions so that your teams are focusing on really high-value interactions.

There are tools that keep you compliant and make sure you’ve got provisional credits out there. These tools can even expand into other payment types, ACH, wire, P2P and check. So you can really start to have a comprehensive tool that allows you to do it all yourself.

Yeah. I think it’s important to draw the distinction you drew there, which is if you’re currently doing disputes, or want to do disputes, and your solution is a spreadsheet, then your vendor is probably a better solution for you.

A lot of our clients are finding that they’re paying a lot of money to keep a really close eye on what their vendors are doing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to put this much energy into it while you’re also paying someone to handle it for you.

And I think the important thing is we don’t have to be an expert in all the rules. These tools provide the rules and the logic to keep you compliant. So you don’t have to become a Mastercard or Visa expert in order to take these in-house.

And they’ll also help you identify trends and things like that that you maybe couldn’t get from just a spreadsheet, right?

Yeah. They’re configurable in terms of getting your institution’s voice out there and deciding what your threshold is, but then they take care of the compliance pieces and the tracking.

Yeah. So listen, folks, I know we all have a lot on our plates. Everybody’s doing a lot of work today, but this might be one of those areas where you want to invest some time and resources internally in owning that disputes process.

The tools are out there to make it more efficient than it’s historically been. You’re not having to rely on just spreadsheets. It’s probably going to be more effective than trying to work through your vendors to get that done.

If you’ve got the scale, you should really be looking at whether or not you can handle your disputes management in-house and hopefully get better results, mitigate some fraud, as well as minimize your operating losses when it comes to that.