NATIONWIDE - OCTOBER 2025 - (USAnews.com) Chargebacks used to be considered a necessary inconvenience. But as refund abuse grows and banks automate dispute decisions at scale, forward-thinking enterprises are waking up to a harder truth: chargebacks aren’t just paperwork. They’re leverage points that shape customer trust, unit economics, fraud posture, and processor relationships.
This growing complexity is where Tarun Singh has chosen to focus his work.
As Product & Strategy Lead at Disputed.ai, Tarun brings over a decade of experience across fraud prevention, dispute operations, and product strategy, spanning Amazon, Chargeflow, and ChargebackCops (acquired). Through years in the field, he began noticing a consistent pattern: disputes weren’t failing because teams lacked effort, they were failing because the industry was often solving the wrong problem.
Most merchants only engage after a chargeback lands. Analysts scramble for transaction context, assemble evidence into hastily formatted PDFs, and submit appeals into black-box issuer systems, hoping for the best. It’s reactive, repetitive, and bound by legacy tooling that wasn’t built for today’s speed or scale.
Tarun and his team approach this challenge differently. They believe the industry needs to ask more fundamental questions:
Why did this dispute happen in the first place?
Where was context missing?
What evidence actually shifts an issuer’s decision?
These aren’t rhetorical, they’re the foundation of how Disputed.ai is reimagining dispute resolution.
From Automation to Intelligence
Instead of simply automating document assembly, Disputed.ai focuses on transforming how merchants understand disputes from the ground up. The platform’s AI doesn’t just generate responses, it helps surface behavioral context, highlight key evidence, and filter out noise. The goal is to give issuers clarity, not clutter.
Every disputed case becomes a learning loop. Each issuer decision reveals friction in the customer journey, policy gaps, fulfillment weaknesses, authentication blind spots. Those insights flow upstream, enabling merchants to fix root causes and prevent disputes before they ever touch a processor queue.
This shift from reaction to prevention reflects a broader trend across the payments ecosystem. As automation matures, intelligence, not just efficiency, is becoming the competitive advantage. Disputed.ai’s approach builds on this principle, helping businesses not only resolve disputes faster but also understand what drives them.
Relationships Over Robots
Despite the technical sophistication behind the platform, the team’s philosophy remains rooted in something simple and human: relationships.
When disputes are handled with transparency and care, merchants preserve customer trust and sidestep unnecessary friction. When they’re rushed, opaque, or impersonal, customers lose confidence, even if the merchant technically “wins.”
Tarun explains that the goal isn’t just to improve dispute outcomes, it’s to help merchants communicate more effectively, align policies with real-world behavior, and maintain trust in moments that typically erode it. As card networks tighten regulations and consumer expectations evolve at breakneck speed, that trust is becoming a core differentiator.
The dispute landscape, once seen as an operational burden, is turning into a litmus test for customer experience. Merchants who treat chargebacks as opportunities for dialogue rather than defensive battles often find their overall service quality improves as well. That philosophy shapes how Disputed.ai builds its tools and supports its partners.
Chargebacks as Signal, Not Tax
Handled with clarity and context, chargebacks don’t have to be a drag on growth. They can be a signal, and with the right system in place, even an advantage.
“At Disputed, we see chargebacks as opportunities to understand and improve,” Singh shares. “When businesses manage chargebacks effectively, they can build stronger, more transparent relationships with their customers.”
This perspective reframes the entire dispute process. Instead of a costly afterthought, it becomes a source of operational intelligence. Each case tells a story about customer behavior, internal process gaps, or product-level confusion. With the right analytics, those stories can drive meaningful change across teams, from product design to customer success.
By leveraging this approach, merchants can reduce future disputes, strengthen brand perception, and increase retention. What once felt like a pure loss becomes a catalyst for learning.
Looking Ahead
The world of payments is evolving faster than ever. As e-commerce expands and digital transactions multiply, the systems built to protect both merchants and consumers are being tested at new levels of complexity. Disputed.ai aims to be part of the solution, not by replacing people with machines, but by helping them see the bigger picture.
At Disputed.ai, the team continues refining tools that make dispute handling smarter, faster, and more transparent.
Connect with Tarun Singh and Disputed.ai
To learn more about Tarun Singh’s work, insights into chargeback management, and how Disputed.ai is helping merchants rethink dispute resolution, visit Tarun Singh’s LinkedIn or explore Disputed.ai.
