ACI Worldwide (Nasdaq: TSAI), a leading international provider of software for electronic payment systems, today announced the ACI Dispute Management System.
The ACI Dispute Management System is a powerful rules-based solution that automates the resolution of disputes and chargebacks to dramatically reduce processing costs in this area. The solution enables organisations to automate tasks associated with dispute processing, and guides staff through those tasks that require human intervention to increase productivity and reduce training time, while controlling exposure to losses due to write-offs and untimely dispute handling.
Disputes and chargeback processing continues to be a labour-intensive and costly exercise for most in the card services arena. Despite card association initiatives to streamline and simplify the process, it remains an area encumbered by multiple, disparate systems, low productivity and is highly error-prone. The profitability of the portfolio is impacted by write-offs due to error and mismanagement and customer focus is often lost in the process, resulting, in the worst cases, in customer attrition.
A single, integrated solution, ACI Dispute Management System offers all the benefits of workflow, task automation and rules management tailored to meet the international card association operating regulations for disputed transaction resolution. The solution provides visibility of disputes at any stage during the lifecycle and enables the identification of repetitive cardholder disputes, multiple transactions associated with a cardholder dispute and multiple transactions associated with a specific dispute arising from a particular fraud attack.
Exception and dispute processing is based on 'electronic folders' that represent individual customer cases. Multiple disputed transactions and the associated processing can be combined in each case with the system providing queue management via system processes. Uniquely, disputes can be managed at the individual transaction case level, customer multiple transaction case level or combined to make a 'super' case to manage disputes arising from attacks in an automated manner.
ACI Dispute Management System enables customers to generate comprehensive audit trails, which is particularly important given the fact that payment disputes may be subject to governmental and internal audits. Financial adjustments are made automatically via integration with the General Ledger and the ACI solution stores all due dates and required customer notifications to maintain a complete historical file on each case.
Jim Woodworth, head of business solutions, ACI Worldwide EMEA, commented: "In the past, many of our customers have written off disputed transactions as it has been non-profitable to pursue them. Existing dispute management systems often require duplication of expensive services and they do not enable banks to build up customer and merchant cases for multiple transactions. In contrast, ACI Dispute Management System enables financial institutions to offer a better service to customers while realising significant savings.
"In addition, industry migration to EMV and the associated liability shift has resulted in an upsurge in disputes and chargebacks. This trend, combined with confusion in understanding the new rules and application of EMV data in the transaction, is putting further pressure on those responsible for managing customer disputes. It is in this type of environment that ACI Dispute Management can aid financial institutions to successfully and profitably resolve customer disputes."