Visa is bringing AI to credit card charge disputes

Visa $V +0.84% has introduced six AI-powered capabilities aimed at overhauling its dispute resolution infrastructure, which the company says is weighed down by outdated, labor-intensive processes that cost the payments industry billions annually.

Dispute volumes have climbed sharply, with Visa handling upward of 106 million cases worldwide last year — a figure roughly a third higher than the company’s 2019 volume, Visa said. The six capabilities are divided equally between the two sides of the transaction — half targeting merchants, the remainder directed at the financial institutions that issue and acquire payments.

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Merchant-facing tools include an early-intervention network designed to head off chargebacks before they escalate, a generative AI module that handles representment drafting and case-outcome forecasting, and an enhanced iteration of the company’s Order Insight product. An April 2026 update to Order Insight allows merchants to submit evidence to banks about suspicious transactions using a framework called Compelling Evidence 3.0, aimed at reducing friendly fraud.

On the institutional side, Visa is rolling out a predictive decisioning model to assist frontline agents on individual cases, an automated document-reading tool that extracts key data and populates response forms, and a centralized platform designed to consolidate fragmented dispute workflows under one roof. The document analyzer is available now for acquirers and is set for issuers in late April 2026. The centralized platform is expected to reach general availability in North America in 2026.

“Some of the challenges are these back-office systems are still largely manual,” Andrew Torre, Visa’s president of value-added services, told CNBC. “We really had to think differently about how we approach this at scale.”

Torre said the company’s goal is to bring the dispute growth rate down. “We’d love to be able to see that growth rate come down,” he told CNBC.

IDC Financial Insights research director for risk, compliance and financial crime Sam Abadir said institutions still depending on manual, fragmented workflows risk leaving recoverable revenue unclaimed while absorbing costs that more modern processes could eliminate.

The launch reflects a broader wave of AI adoption sweeping the financial sector, as banks and payment networks work to replace legacy back-office processes with automated alternatives. Alongside the dispute tools, Visa has introduced a subscription management capability allowing cardholders to terminate unwanted recurring charges, which Torre positioned as part of a coordinated effort to improve the overall consumer payments experience.

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