SAN FRANCISCO— Visa is rolling out a new slate of dispute-resolution tools as card disputes continue to climb, underscoring how chargebacks and so-called “friendly fraud” are becoming a bigger cost and customer-service problem for merchants and financial institutions alike.
The payments giant said it processed 106 million disputes globally in 2025, up 35% from 2019, and is introducing six new and enhanced services aimed at reducing the billions of dollars it says are lost each year to outdated, inefficient dispute processes.
Visa said the new tools are designed to attack disputes earlier in the process—before they escalate into full chargebacks—and to use AI to speed document review, improve case decisions and automate representment.
Among the offerings are the Visa Dispute Resolution Network, which aims to resolve potential disputes in the pre-dispute stage, and Visa Dispute Recovery Manager, which uses GenAI and win-prediction scoring to help merchants recover revenue on disputed transactions. An updated Order Insight product is also being enhanced to let merchants provide richer transaction details and use Compelling Evidence 3.0 to help issuers distinguish suspicious claims from legitimate purchases.
For issuers and acquirers, Visa is also introducing AI-driven tools meant to reduce the manual burden of reviewing chargebacks and fraud claims. Those include Dispute Intelligence, which uses predictive AI models and Visa network data to help agents make case decisions; Dispute Doc Analyzer, which summarizes merchant documentation for faster review; and Visa Dispute Case Manager, a centralized platform intended to manage disputes across multiple card networks from intake through resolution. Visa said some tools are available now, while others are scheduled to roll out later in 2026, including a North America launch for Case Manager.
The move highlights a broader industry problem: disputes are no longer just a back-office nuisance but an increasingly strategic payments issue, especially as digital commerce grows and more claims stem from cardholder confusion or first-party misuse rather than classic stolen-card fraud. Visa cited IDC Financial Insights in saying institutions that still rely on fragmented, manual dispute workflows risk leaving recoverable revenue on the table while absorbing avoidable operating costs.
“Disputes put strain on every part of the payments ecosystem, frustrating consumers, while driving cost and complexity for merchants and financial institutions,” Andrew Torre, president of value-added services at Visa, said in announcing the new services.