When a business raises its prices, customers usually hear a familiar explanation. It may be that tariffs went up, shipping costs increased, labor got more expensive, or energy prices rose. But, there’s another meaningful cost source that gets less attention: losses tied to customers misusing the payment dispute process. When customers misuse the chargeback process to dispute legitimate purchases, the …
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Amazing news! I’m genuinely honored to share that I’ve been picked as a finalist in the Tech Leadership – Visionary Founder category at the 2026 Banking Tech Awards. Being included on this shortlist means a great deal to me. The Banking Tech Awards have been celebrating innovation and excellence in financial technology for, really, the better part of three decades. …
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Most merchants are sitting on one of the most valuable business intelligence assets in their industry and treating it as an accounting record. Every transaction your payment system processes contains information about customer behavior, fraud patterns, operational efficiency, and revenue opportunity. The problem isn’t access to data. It’s that we’ve built habits around ignoring it. I’ve spent fifteen years working …
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The “buy now, pay later” story has always had two versions running simultaneously. In one version, installment payments are a conversion miracle: higher order values, new customers, reduced cart abandonment. In the other, they’re a dangerous liability, promising overleveraged consumers, regulatory exposure, and merchant fees that quietly erode margins that headline rates don’t reflect. Both versions are true, at least …
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I’m pleased to share that I’ve been named as a finalist in the Women in PayTech Award category at the 2026 Payments Awards! Being included among this group of industry leaders is genuinely meaningful to me, and I’m grateful to the organizers for the recognition. The Payments Awards celebrate excellence and innovation across the payments industry. Organizers spotlight the individuals …
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Mastercard’s Scam Merchant Monitoring Program went into effect on July 24, 2026. If you process card-not-present transactions, this change affects you. Not hypothetically, and not eventually. I mean right now. Today. The program adds a third layer of compliance monitoring on top of the Excessive Chargeback Program (ECP) and the Excessive Fraud Merchant (EFM) program that merchants already navigate. Understanding …
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I was recently looking over some new data published by NerdWallet on the state of air travel in the US. According to the data, airfare prices have surged 26.7% year-over-year. The timing couldn’t be more consequential here; as we’re heading into peak travel season, consumers are already stretched thin. Operational disruptions continue to compound and the payments infrastructure that the …
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Most merchants managing chargebacks believe they’re doing reasonably well. They track their win rates, they represent disputes diligently, and when the numbers come back showing they’ve won nearly half their cases, they take that as confirmation that their program is working. According to new our 2026 Chargeback Field Report, merchants report winning 44.6% of the chargebacks they receive. That’s a …
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The most successful merchants I know today aren’t just thinking about optimizing their core business operations. They’re asking a more fundamental question: What if the payment infrastructure we’ve built to support our customers could become a profit center itself? I’m talking about a shift from viewing financial services as operational overhead to seeing them as strategic opportunity. This represents one …
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When I look at the dispute patterns crossing my desk today, one thing becomes immediately clear: the subscription economy has fundamentally broken the traditional chargeback framework. We’ve taken a dispute system designed for discrete transactions and forced it to handle ongoing relationships, creating friction that benefits no one. Not merchants, not consumers, and certainly not the networks trying to adjudicate …
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