Mastercard and Salesforce’s new initiative to help customers streamline transaction disputes is a “huge win” for both companies, analysts say. The partnership integrates Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud (FSC) with Mastercard’s dispute resolution services.
According to the 2024 Cardholder Dispute Index from Chargebacks911, 78% of U.S consumers filed at least one chargeback in the past year, amounting to a minimum of $65.2 billion in disputed charges in 2023. With the growth of online purchasing, Mastercard’s fraud dispute service, Ethoca, projects that by 2026 there could be 337 million chargebacks annually, a 42% increase from current numbers.
This provides a fruitful landscape for the new partnership. Ethoca already offers near real-time notifications when a financial institution raises a chargeback. Now, that data will be entered into Salesforce, which can connect the merchant and payment information to back offices at the relevant card issuer, giving greater visibility to every team member working on the dispute.
The new integration benefits both merchants and customers by speeding up the resolution of transaction disputes and reducing the costs of resolving them. Salesforce hopes the partnership will deflect about a quarter of its call center queries. For its FDC customers, the technology is already available.
“This is a huge win for both Mastercard and Salesforce,” said Don Apgar, Director of Merchant Services at Javelin Strategy & Research. “Once a cardholder opens a dispute with their card issuer, gathering the history of the transaction as well as the merchant’s version of that history has proven to be most difficult part of the chargeback process to automate. Using the Salesforce SFC to inventory and share those facts is a huge win for issuers struggling to upgrade or build an in-house CRM to address these issues.”
AI Is the Key
Mastercard’s wealth of data makes it uniquely positioned to detect fraud.
“We see something like 140 billion transactions every year from 3 billion cards in 210 countries,” Raj Seshadri, Mastercard’s Chief Commercial Payments Officer, said last week at the Barclays 14th Annual Emerging Payments and FinTech Forum. “That’s a lot of data. And then we have hundreds of third-party sources that we leverage to create, add nuance and color. We use advanced analytics, machine learning, AI to really create data sets that are high quality and machine readable.”
The use of AI is exceptionally relevant when it comes to chargebacks. In February, Mastercard announced an upgrade to its card network to add more generative AI technology to handle and resolve disputes.
