CINDY FASHINGBAUER: Hi everyone. I’m Cindy and I’m a fraud expert here at Stripe. I got started in the payment space in 2014 where I quickly fell in love with the world of disputes. When I was working in ticketing... I know. When I was working in the ticketing space, what I often heard was disputes are an inevitable part of doing business. While they may be inevitable, the losses don’t have to be. Like most challenges in payments, disputes are a profit problem you can solve. We will show you how by first introducing you to four distinct archetypes. We’ll highlight each and ask you to identify the one that fits you best. Second, we’ll walk you through the Stripe solutions that align with that archetype. Before I dive in, let’s do a quick pulse check in the room. By a show of hands, who here has seen their disputes volume increase over the last 12 to 24 months?

Okay. Yeah, that’s what I expected, seeing a lot of hands here. All right. Let me give you a quick benchmark. We tracked average businesses at Stripe and found that their dispute volume grew by 29% year over year as their payments volumes scaled. This isn’t an anomaly, and it’s not a bad sign. In fact, increasing dispute volume is often a sign you’ve built something people want. When you reach more customers, fraudsters are never far behind. With that in mind, an important metric to track is how fast your disputes grow relative to your payment volume. The key is ensuring your disputes don’t outpace that growth, that payment volume growth. So what do you do? The goal then becomes minimizing your dispute growth while maximizing your revenue recovery. The first step to answering that question is to measure their true cost. Most businesses believe a dispute only costs as much as the lost revenue, but that’s only part of the story.

Let’s imagine a business selling $200 worth of flowers that ends up getting disputed. First, you have the cost of goods sold at $200. Then the cost of shipping, can call that $10. Then you pay a $15 dispute fee. Another $15 if you decide to fight and end up losing. Now let’s factor in the average hourly cost to actually fight a dispute, which comes to $35. And for some of you, it might take more than an hour to compile that evidence. Finally, if you’re in a monitoring program, those fines can range $50 to $150 per dispute. As you can see, the all-in cost you thought was $200 is actually more like $425.

So how should you think about fixing this? As the cost of disputes increase, businesses need to become more sophisticated in how they handle disputes, which is why the framework we use to segment users relies on both cost and sophistication. Let’s start with cost. Costs are a function of fees, average order value, and dispute rates. High costs and dispute rates push you to the right. Now, sophistication is a function of your win rates, response rates, and operations maturity. If you’re just blindly fighting what you can or not fighting at all, you’re probably on the lower end of this axis. If you’ve automated your disputes flow or have a team of analysts with custom templates, you’re probably towards the top. So now that I’ve introduced the framework for our archetypes, let’s get started with the lower left quadrant. Or this is what we call our early-stage archetypes.

If you’re anything like new-to-market businesses I’ve advised in the past, it’s likely disputes haven’t been a major concern. Companies in this quadrant are typically small businesses, startups, and generally just handle disputes manually when and if they happen. Your disputes rates are usually less than 0.4%. You have less than 100 a year, and your disputes cost less than $200. Now let’s move along the access to the right. This quadrant contains businesses that fit into the growth stage archetype. So this quadrant tends to have high-growth AI companies or small startups and their employees wear many hats. Some defining traits are disputes that are growing quickly and have surpassed that 0.4% mark. Over 100 disputes a year. And regardless of your average order value, your dispute cost is high, which then let’s look at the upper-right corner. That’s our operation stage. So companies in this quadrant tend to be enterprise or late stage with large dispute volumes. You have a high AOV greater than 200.

You have a disputes team compiling customized evidence packets. You have a high win rate, but you only fight disputes that are worth fighting. Finally, let’s look at the top-left corner. Or what we call our automation stage. Companies in this quadrant tend to be tech savvy digital natives that are likely selling subscriptions or other digital services with AOVs under 200. They usually fight disputes with API-driven responses, with minimal human intervention, and they tend to have high sensitivity to dispute rate seasonality. So I want you all to keep these in mind for the next part of our presentation. Now that you know where you fit, I’m going to pass this off to Ishan who will talk to you about our products. Ishan, take it away. Okay.

ISHAN VIRK: Thanks, Cindy. And hi everyone. It’s a room full of people who care about disputes. This is like my Coachella. Well, welcome. I lead product for disputes here at Stripe, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how you can solve the pain points in each of the quadrants you just saw. So now that you know where you fit, let’s talk about what you can actually do. Now, if you’re sitting in this room, you likely already know that disputes sit at the very end of the payments lifecycle. But maybe what you didn’t know is that disputes can happen up to 540 days after the initial charge. That’s almost two years after the charge, which is obviously a little bit crazy, but it’s also what makes fighting disputes such an interesting challenge. And at Stripe, we make that even a little bit more interesting by taking that final step and instead of treating it like one step, we actually break that moment down into three layers of protection.

The first layer is deflection. This is all about preventing the dispute before it actually happens. The second is resolution. This is about stepping in early before it actually becomes a dispute and avoiding the hit to your dispute rate. And finally, we have representment. Where the goal is to respond to disputes with strong data to try to win back your revenue. Now, before I walk through each one of these, I would like to ask everyone in the room, I’m curious, with just a show of hands, how many of you have actually ever filed a dispute? Okay, that’s a lot more than I thought. Well, I’m not going to teach you how to file a dispute, but I will show you this. Your consumer’s dispute experience starts when they open their banking app and they see something like this. Now, if I asked you, what is this charge here specifically?

I bet most of you couldn’t tell me. So maybe you try to click into it and you’d see something like this, which is frankly still pretty confusing. But that confusion right there is one of the most common starting points for why consumers file disputes and sometimes commit friendly fraud. In fact, about one in eight consumers admit to it. And yes, sometimes it’s intentional, but honestly, most of the time it’s just purchase confusion, and that’s what deflection was built to fix. We partner with networks like Verifi and Ethoca to integrate directly with the issuers so that we could completely change the experience, so that from now on, when your consumers open your banking app, they won’t see something like this, but instead they’ll see your business’s name, logo, and if they click in to see more details, they’ll get a full itemized digital receipt where they can see the order IDs, purchase descriptions, purchase quantities, tax breakdowns, and comprehensive contact details.

The goal of this product is very simple. Help consumers recognize the charge so they don’t file the dispute, because the best way to fight disputes is to just never get them in the first place. On average, businesses using deflection see about a 2.4% reduction in dispute rates, and that compounds over time as your business grows. We’ve taken it a step even further by integrating with programs like Visa CE 3.0, so that now, if a customer tries to file a fraudulent dispute and Stripe can prove that you and the customer have done business together in the last year, the bank actually has to block the dispute entirely. That little “file a dispute” button in the banking app just disappears. And companies like DesignCrowd, Shipt, and Hostinger, they’ve blocked up to 11% of their Visa disputes this way. That’s why I recommend this product for basically every archetype in the matrix.

There’s no integration, there’s no cost, there’s no downside. It’s practically like taking vitamins for your disputes. Now, sometimes recognition isn’t enough, and that’s where the second layer comes in, resolution. When you turn this on, Stripe gets an early signal from the networks that a dispute is incoming, and that gives you a little bit of a window to step in before it becomes official. You can set up simple rules to resolve these disputes, and when you do, a few things happen. There’s no longer a dispute fee. There’s no operational effort. Your customers are getting a better experience, and maybe most importantly, these resolved disputes don’t count towards your dispute rate. And that’s what makes this one of the most powerful tools in your tool belt against network monitoring programs. Now, resolution at Stripe is differentiated by first, self-serve onboarding that’s accessible directly in the Dashboard. So what used to take weeks of integration now just takes a few minutes, and I’ll show you that in a second.

Second, you can set up simple resolution rules directly again in the Dashboard so that you decide what gets resolved and what doesn’t. And with per-resolution pricing, you only pay for what you actually resolve. We also now offer backtesting so you can see the estimated impact of your rules before you even go live. We’ve built onboarding APIs specifically for platforms so you can help your connected accounts manage their dispute rates and soon users who don’t want to manage custom rules at all can simply tell Stripe their desired dispute rate target and our AI will figure out the most cost effective way to get you there. On average, businesses using resolution saw a 60% reduction in dispute rates. And in some cases, if you’re willing to set more aggressive rules, that’s even higher. For example, AMC, Duolingo, Mastermind, and Reel.ai were scaling very quickly and used resolution to stabilize their dispute rates by up to 95%.

Now, this is especially important for two user groups: users in the growth stage and those in the automation stage. If you’re a fast-growing company like an AI startup and your dispute rate is climbing, you’re worried about network monitoring programs, honestly, this is your silver bullet. And if you’re already automated, this is how you keep your baseline healthy. Just resolve the disputes you weren’t going to fight anyways. And zooming out for a second, the shift towards early resolution is happening everywhere. Just between 2022 and 2025, we saw the number of resolved disputes on Stripe grow by a factor of 11. This basically tells you that this is quickly becoming the default way that businesses across the globe are choosing to preserve their customer relationships and keep their dispute rates low. Now, let me show you how simple this actually is.

Imagine I’m a florist, and I’m selling bouquets online. Business is growing fast, but as a symptom of that, I just got hit with 500 disputes in a week. Obviously, I need to bring my dispute rate down very quickly, or I am at risk of paying thousands of dollars in network fines, $150 fees per dispute, and I could even lose my privilege to process payments online. So I’ll go into my Stripe Dashboard here, and the first thing I’ll do is I will go to my Settings, Payments, head on to Disputes, and the first thing I see are my prevention tools. So let’s go ahead and turn on deflection first. Immediately I see that on the left side, all my details are actually already auto-populated. And on the right, I can preview exactly what my customers will see on their banking app. Instead of a generic payment amount with a statement descriptor, my customers will now see their business name, URL, phone number, where I’m located, a description of my business, and then next time an issuer tries to ask Stripe for more data on a transaction, Stripe will send whatever it has so that I can build a very enhanced digital receipt.

So I’ll go ahead and click submit, and that’s it. From now on, every single one of my consumers will see a much more clear picture of what they bought. Now let’s go on to resolution. I’ll click activate again. Now, if I wanted to be very aggressive, I could just choose to resolve all disputes. And in this case, it would reduce my dispute rate by 100%. And that’s great, but I actually kind of want to fight a few of my disputes. So I’m going to go ahead and choose “write custom rule,” and I can choose to write these rules with over eight different attributes. I could choose to write them by currency, statement descriptor, amount, reason code, card brand, and a few more. But what I like to do is fight any dispute that isn’t fraudulent and is over $100. So let’s write a rule for the opposite.

If the dispute is fraudulent and the amount in USD, since that’s where I do business, or at least fake business, I’ll click less than a hundred, preview my impact, and it seems like in this case, it’ll reduce my dispute rate by 20%, which is kind of what I need right now. So I’ll go ahead and click submit, and that’s it. My dispute rate will start to decline immediately.

Okay, let’s move on to the final step in the funnel, actually winning your money back. You might have to change the slides. But before I get into that, let me ask you one last question. How many of you have actually ever lost a dispute because you never responded? And that could be because you missed the deadline, you didn’t have time, you didn’t have resourcing. Okay. Well, you’re not alone because in 2025, the number on Stripe was $1.3 billion, and that’s why we built Smart Disputes so that you never lose by default again. When a dispute comes in now, we will try to automatically build an evidence packet for you, and we’ll wait until the deadline to submit it, so that if you want to handle it yourself, you definitely still can. But if you don’t, then Stripe can still step in and turn what was going to be a guaranteed loss into a potential win.

Now that’s just the first problem. The second is that many businesses, they don’t know how to actually build a very strong evidence packet. Well, now you won’t have to guess or ask your favorite LLM what to do every single time, because we took a step back and analyzed Stripe’s dispute data. It’s one of the largest disputes data sets in the world of over $5 billion worth of disputes a year, and we rebuilt the disputes experience from the ground up. So that now, when you open a dispute on Stripe, you won’t just have some sort of form to fill out, but instead, you’ll see an AI-recommended evidence strategy that is tailored to your reason code and your issuer on that dispute. You’ll see your likelihood of winning, an AI summary of your cardholder’s complaint. We’ll score your packet as you build it so you know exactly how strong your evidence is and many more features that are designed to specifically help you win.

And for those who want to push their win rates even further, we’ve now improved Smart Disputes so that you can actually add your evidence to our packet. To explain that to you a little bit more, try to think of a packet as three different layers. First, there’s data that Stripe has that you don’t. We look across trillions of dollars of transactions across the Stripe network, and we see how a device, email, or identity has performed against other businesses on Stripe, and we pull those exclusive signals into your packet. Second, there’s data that we both have. We will autofill all of that and enrich it so that you don’t have to. And lastly, there’s data only you have. These are things like tracking information, customer messages, or server logs. Now you can plug that directly into Smart Disputes and we will fold it into an AI optimized packet.

We’ve even built automations into individual fields. For example, if you just give us a tracking number, we will go pull proof of deliveries, fulfillment histories, and even porch delivery photos from over 12 different shipping providers like FedEx and complete the story for you.

On average, users recovered 18% more revenue with Smart Disputes, and those who added our AI recommended evidence are winning three times more often than those who don’t. Now, since by default, Smart Disputes only fights disputes that we’re going to time out, I recommend this product for everybody. It’s practically free money. If you’re early stage, you’re probably not thinking about disputes very much right now, so just let us manage them for you. If you’re a high-growth business, let us fight the ones you didn’t have time for. If you have mature operations, then maybe let us fight the ones that are far too expensive for you to fight. And if you’re already automated, then augment your packets by combining them with ours and boost your win rate. Now, let me show you one more demo to see how this looks like. So let’s pretend I’m a florist selling flowers online again, and I see that I just got a thousand dollar dispute, and I definitely cannot afford to lose this, but luckily, Smart Disputes is already available.

So I’ll go ahead and click respond. Now I’m selling flowers, so I ship physical products. I’ll answer that. I have not yet talked to my customer, so none of these apply to me, and that’s it. Stripe is building a custom strategy tailored to my dispute. So the first thing I’m going to try to do is actually look at that strategy. We’ll open the analysis and see that the customer is claiming that they never received their bouquet of roses, and they’re acknowledging that they have not yet attempted to reach out to me before they filed this dispute. Stripe has also summarized the Visa dispute rules, and it clearly states that the highest impact thing I can do is to provide proof of delivery. So if I scroll down, I see that my evidence strength is actually already pretty high, which indicates that Stripe must have added something on my behalf already, but clearly what I’m missing is my shipping info.

So let’s go ahead and add that. I ship with FedEx. Here’s a tracking number, and we’ll click submit and Stripe is doing all the manual work for me. It’s pulling fulfillment histories and building a detailed timeline of when my roses actually got delivered to the customer. So let’s go ahead and review the evidence. Now I can see everything else that Stripe has added for me. I don’t want to check everything, but let’s spot check a few things. Policy documents, it looks like Stripe found my refund policy, cancellation policy. It’s even extracted the key details and turned it into a narrative that can help invalidate the dispute. Another thing that I find interesting is this exclusive data from Stripe. It’s clearly added some customer history by analyzing it across Stripe’s network. It’s found fraud detection patterns, and it’s added location and device details. Now, this is data that I would not have access to on my own.

So all this put together makes me feel pretty confident that I’ve got the best packet I possibly could here. So I’ll go ahead and send response, and that’s it. What used to take me hours just took me a few minutes. Now I lied. I said this would be the last demo, but there’s one more. So for those who are platforms or SaaS leaders in this room, I think let’s pretend if you were selling or helping florists online sell flowers. I’m sure your customers are very good at what they do, but they’re not dispute experts. And we’ve heard many times over that they keep asking platforms for help. Now you can help your customers with just two toggles. We’ll go back to our Settings here and we’ll go on Connect, Disputes, this is a new setting, and all you have to do is turn on auto-respond, and that’s it.

From now on, all of your connected accounts will see the same experience that I just showed you, and every single time they get a dispute, Smart Disputes will try to build an evidence packet for them so they never lose by default. But let’s take it one step even further. Let’s try to monetize the product. So let’s search a pricing tool, and you’ll see a new tab here for Smart Disputes. Let’s click edit and I’ll see you have three options. Smart Disputes bills me 30% every time a dispute is one. I could choose to pass that fee along. I could choose to absorb those fees, or I can actually monetize this product by setting my own sell rate. Let’s say I set that at 35%, click save, confirm, that’s it. Now, every single time I help one of my customers win a dispute, I will pocket a 5% margin.

I just created a brand new revenue stream with four clicks. Disputes are an inherent part of doing business online. They create trust in the ecosystem so that customers can buy things sight unseen. So while they’re not going away anytime soon, the way you deal with them can change. My recommendation is deflect them when you can, resolve them early when it matters, and fight the ones worth fighting so that when you put it all together, disputes stop being a cost center for you and become an automated system that protects your revenue. Cool. I see some questions. So let’s see. The first one might be, how have LLMs and AI changed the landscape for disputes?

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: Oh, my new favorite question. Well, first off, it’s still kind of a work in progress. We’re figuring it out. So there’s lots of partnering with the networks. I think generally as an industry, we’re still seeing where this goes. I think a lot of you probably know that, but I think it’s time we all start thinking about it now, right? So what used to be just a buyer and a seller is now a buyer, seller, an agent. So let’s say I want to go buy a rug. I have actually been doing that recently and find it very tedious. So I want a red-orange wool rug, right? So if I tell my agent to go find that for me, we could run into some issues with color. So let’s say a red polyester rug shows up on my doorstep. Now, am I going to dispute that?

I don’t know. So what now the case will be is I, as the merchant have to prove at the time of purchase that I was transparent, it was clear, understood like the agent understood my product catalog and saw the color red-orange, right? So it kind of changes the entire... Instead of human eyes, you’re working with metadata. So it’s interesting. We’ll see where that goes long term.

ISHAN VIRK: Yeah. And another thing we’re seeing is just the use of LLMs across the ecosystem. Issuers are starting to use more and more OCR to try to review and adjudicate your packets. And on the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got users who are building agents to try to fight disputes and you’ve just got kind of machines talking to machines. And that’s where I think once your opponent is very machine driven, that puts the onus on you to be sure that your dispute packets are very clear, easy to read, and therefore will get scored appropriately. But another thing obviously we’re seeing is that the networks have increased costs on disputes, especially when you lose them. And so an important thing to note in your automations as you build them is to not just be broader in what you fight, but also smarter. And that’s kind of what Smart Disputes is built to do, right?

We try to use our AI to analyze all the data that we have and figure out how network rules are changing, how issuers are changing their behavior, what kind of data works where and when. And one of the things I think we’re pretty proud of is that when our ML thinks that it’s a reasonable chance that you will win this dispute with Smart Disputes, we actually waive our counter fees to kind of put skin in the game with you.

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: Awesome. Cool.

ISHAN VIRK: And more?

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: Yeah.

ISHAN VIRK: Okay. Visa just changed their monitoring program criteria, collapsing fraud and disputes. How can Stripe help me navigate and change and avoid fines? This is probably best for you.

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: Okay. Yeah, the vamp. Everyone’s a new favorite topic, right? So this last month, the rate went down to 1.5% from 2.2%, so that’s obviously a change we’re seeing. All the tools that Ishan just kind of covered in our talk are going to be your best bet. And in addition to that, we send notifications. So when we think you’re trending towards potential concerning points, we’ll let you know proactively so we can try to help you avoid landing in a program. And yeah, generally deflection, CE 3.0, resolution, those are going to be your best bets whenever you’re kind of approaching a program. Question three.

ISHAN VIRK: Let’s do that one. That looks good. It looks exciting.

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: All right. Smart Disputes. How does it work? Is it global and does it work with manually submitted documentation? How does it work with platforms?

ISHAN VIRK: Okay. I can probably take this. So Smart Disputes is global. There’s no restrictions on where it applies. Right now it only fights card disputes, not LPM disputes. That’s maybe one restriction right now, but we’re trying to solve that in the future. As for does it work with platforms? Yes, it does. Again, platforms should be considered of a few things. There’s so many combinatorials you can do with how a platform is set up. The important thing is that you can be a user who either is liable for the dispute, is the merchant of record or is paying the fees, and that creates some different incentives to be aware of. But luckily with Smart Disputes, what we do is if you’re a platform who is responsible for the disputes, we’ll generate packets and you can choose to submit them and you’ll be billed directly. But if you are a platform like a Custom Connect one who is passing fees through to your users, we will still build packets for your users and you can actually choose to white-label and resell Smart Disputes and choose to add a markup, as I showed, to those Smart Disputes.

I think the other kind of thing this is getting at is like, how does this work with manual packets? So the way to think about it is there will essentially be two packets. When a dispute opens, you can either choose to fight it yourself with your own manual packet. You can add evidence to that and submit it as you normally do, or you can add evidence, that same evidence, to a Smart Disputes packet. And that’s when you’re starting to layer the data that we showed earlier, and that’s definitely going to be the better way to win your disputes because you’re going to have more data that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise, but that’s where you can kind of A/B test and see how it performs for you. Cool.

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: All right. I think...

ISHAN VIRK: Want to do this one? If I’m new to payments, how should I think about disputes?

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: Yeah. All right. So there’s obviously the consumer angle. So definitely think about how your customer perceives your checkout, if there’s a subscription, is it clear that they’re signing up for one? Do I understand the terms of service? Kind of all that, I guess the human psychology element of signing up, because those are all things that you can use as evidence long term if your customer tries to claim like, “Oh, I didn’t know I was signing up for recurring billing.” Generally also the reality we live in is fraud will happen. So understand and try to mitigate fraud sooner than later. Long term, obviously that can drive your disputes up. Those are the, I would say clarity, transparency, that usually goes a long way with customers.

ISHAN VIRK: The only other thing I would add is disputes grow before you know it and you should definitely step in early and turn on some of these products, especially deflection, which is just going to help you reduce your dispute rights, and study the different network rules because winning disputes is really about being very prescriptive to what the network asks for instead of just submitting random evidence and you’ll be in good shape.

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: Yeah. Awesome.

ISHAN VIRK: Cool. That’s all we have time for.

CINDY FASHINGBAUER: Okay. Thanks everyone.