Mastercard and Salesforce Team to Resolve Transaction Disputes

Mastercard and Salesforce have announced an integration designed to reduce purchase disputes and chargebacks.

“Disputes and chargebacks, where a consumer notices a transaction they don’t recognise and requests a chargeback from their bank, represent a significant challenge to the entire payments industry,” the companies said in a news release Thursday (May 16).

“The integration will streamline the way issuers, like banks and other financial institutions, view and manage transaction data, such as disputes and decisions. It will enable a quicker, more efficient and transparent response to dispute inquiries.”

According to the release, the collaboration involves integrating Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud (FSC) with Mastercard’s dispute resolution services, creating a one-stop-shop for intake, managing disputes, reporting and preventing chargebacks.

Mastercard’s services include Ethoca Alerts, which provides notifications when a financial institution raises a chargeback, and Ethoca Consumer Clarity, allowing for merchant and purchase insights to issuer back-office teams. The data from those services is now being submitted to FSC to give bank agents and team members more visibility into disputes.

“Technology is helping to speed up and improve the checkout experience, especially when shopping online,” said Johan Gerber, Mastercard’s executive vice president for security and cyber innovation.

“However, every disputed transaction can create stress for the consumer as well as resource pressures and increased costs for merchants and financial institutions. Through this partnership, we are adding to the tools that make it easier and faster for banks and merchants to resolve disputes, further enhancing trust in the ways they choose to pay.”

As PYMNTS wrote in March, chargebacks have long been a tricky problem for merchants, and one that has become more prevalent as transactions become increasingly digitized.

“They not only represent a loss of revenue but can also incur additional fees and damage relationships with payment processors,” that report said. “The rise of eCommerce has seen an uptick in chargebacks, making it crucial for merchants to possess effective tools for their prevention and management.”

That’s why network-led initiatives are so important for offering merchants a standardized way to guard against post-transaction fraud disputes and prevent chargebacks.

“Being able to handle chargebacks preventatively has a huge ROI [return on investment],” Robert Painter, director of chargeback management at Kount, an Equifax company, told PYMNTS. “It means no chargeback, no refund, and no case to go down and chase.”