The Smarter Way to Win Chargebacks with Justt Founder Roenen Ben-Ami

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems and NPS One, our smart invoicing tool. And today we have a special guest on the show. All our guests are special and we're going to be talking about payments, fraud, AI, chargebacks, with Ronen Ben-Ami from Justt, J-U-S-T-T dot AI. And welcome to the show, Ronen.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Allen.

And where are you joining us from?

I'm currently in our Tel Aviv office at the moment.

Okay, so tell us, like, what drove you? How long has the company been around and what drove you to start this?

Great. So we started almost 5.5, 6 years ago now, and we deal with chargebacks for merchants, especially those illegitimate, what they call friendly fraud or first-party misuse chargebacks, trying to recover those funds on behalf of the merchants in a different way, not using manual teams and not using automation of templates. But rather getting a tailored response for each and every case using a system we call dynamic arguments. And what that allows us to do is to tailor each and every case and actually handle the volumes at scale. This all started in my career in the payments space. I started on the anti-fraud side of things, and in the anti-fraud space, I was really growing during that revolution of using machine learning to actually detect true fraud. And technology was at the forefront of many of the businesses at that time. I worked at a company that was purchased by Nuvei. It was the first anti-fraud solution to actually deal with fiat to crypto transactions. The toughest fraudsters still today sit in the crypto space, uh, and they were also a payment processor. I started on the fraud side and then built out their processes to be a legitimate payment processor on the network, working with 5 different acquiring banks, building out their merchant screening and monitoring teams, fraud and chargeback monitoring teams. And I saw the chargeback problem. You can screen your merchants so you're working with legitimate merchants. You could build a great anti-fraud solution to stop true fraud, but still chargebacks are coming through, these illegitimate friendly fraud chargebacks. And the solutions that existed on the market didn't solve my pain point properly. They were either these manual processes that I built a manual team of 20 individuals. They do a great job, volumes go through the roof and you can't get to all the chargebacks, or you can automate a template and the quality of your evidence goes down the tubes. So you're not getting a tailored response.

So today, like, the whole chargeback thing is worrying a lot of merchants because with a lot of merchants never even heard of a TC40. Until this whole thing came up with VAMP, V-A-M-P, for those listening. You know, now we have— now, you know, it's really starting to affect high-volume merchants. And the other thing is what we're finding out is that some of the acquiring banks are going over their VAMP ratio, and then they're having to like clamp down on the merchants harder than they normally would. Because the bank is over the, you know, the acquirer is over the limit. And friendly fraud is completely out of control today. And I talk to merchants about this all the time, our e-commerce merchants. And I'm like, you know, nothing for that— for, for a lot of them that are super high volume, obviously manual review You know, it's not always an option, but I always tell them, you know, if your order, natural order size is, let's say, $50 to $200 and you're getting orders for thousands of dollars, those are the ones that you need to look at.

Yeah, it's a great point. I'll start with VAMP. It's so interesting because A, VAMP put a lot of confusion into the market because there were so many changes that happened until Visa finalized. What the rules of their new ratio limits will be. And in addition, before that, there was VFMP and VDMP that looked at your TC40s on the VFMP ratio and looked at your chargebacks on the VDMP ratio. And you're exactly right, most merchants were just monitoring their VDMP ratios and they didn't even know about the TC40s that were being monitored on VFMP. We had several where merchants that spoke to us said, we always were below our VDMP limits, but we still went into the, into the high-risk programs, like, because of VFMP. And that's the one positive thing about VAMP. If they're bringing it all under one roof in one ratio, that you have to monitor everything in one ratio, so you don't just monitor one thing and don't realize that there's another thing being monitored behind the scenes. The downside is, because it's being monitored all together, You need to make sure you have all the data to monitor that ratio. And you're exactly right, you have to have your TC40s. Most merchants already have their TC15s because it's just all of their chargebacks, but you have to have access to your TC40s in order to monitor your VAMP ratio properly. Um, and the thing is, is I've done a few sessions with Visa on VAMP now, and I feel like there's a lot of fear that merchants are going to go past the limits on VAMP. But what Visa has stated is that most merchants that are below the limits before VAMP should actually stay below the limits after VAMP. But Allen, you brought up a good point. The question is, is are the acquiring banks going to stay below their limits? Because the acquiring banks' limits are also different today. And even though the merchant may be below the limits based off of the VAMP ratios, Don't forget to follow B2B Vault, the biz-to-biz podcast on YouTube.

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The acquiring banks from PSP is going to be stricter on their merchants than VAMP is on their merchants in order to keep them below the limit. So there's definitely some pros and cons of VAMP, a lot of confusion about VAMP. We could spend this whole podcast talking about VAMP. I have so much to say about it. Good.

So explain, like, so obviously we're not— well, not obviously. Whenever we talk about chargebacks on the show, I've had, you know, chargebacks in general, we're talking about e-commerce and non-card-present merchants. So do you focus just on the e-commerce side or also people who are like maybe sending out contracts and key-entering transactions too, or How does that— what type of businesses are you working with?

Yeah, great question, because we really started the company in the e-commerce space because that's really the biggest pain of where a lot of the chargebacks are happening. But as we grew as a company, many of our merchants who had online stores also have brick-and-mortar stores. So once they saw what we could do for them in the online space, they asked if we can also handle their brick-and-mortar store chargebacks. That act quite differently and you need to know the nuances and the rule differences between the two. So today we actually handle chargebacks across the board, whether it be card present, card not present, moto transactions across the board. We're handling those chargebacks.

Oh, that's great. One of the biggest complaints that we hear from clients, especially like retail, doesn't really— we don't see that much fraud in retail except just outright fraud. When somebody tricks the cashier to key enter a card in, you know, and then it's just outright fraud. There's nothing that can be done about that. But, you know, we do get these chargebacks from restaurants, bars, and nightclubs, and those are super frustrating. The person will say, I wasn't there, oh, I ordered something, they were supposed to deliver it. They'll make up like the craziest excuses, like Oh, it was the product, the goods and services were not as described, things like that. And business owners get like very— they like flip out. The person came in here, they ate dinner, they blew up a check for $500, and now they're charging it back, you know, and they did everything right. They EMV chipped the card. The tip was at the time of the sale. Everything is good. And then boom, everything goes sideways for the restaurant.

Yeah, yeah, it's a great point you're bringing up. I think the food industry is a really unique space in itself. We're seeing different trends of chargeback ratios in different industries. And what we're really seeing in the food industry, especially in food delivery, for example, is a lot of fraud reason code chargebacks. You don't see that many fraud reason code chargebacks compared to non-fraud in other industries like you do in the food industry. I feel like it's just the easy way out is just say, it wasn't me. I didn't— I wasn't there. I didn't do it. I didn't make this transaction. It's just the way that we see a lot of the cases in the food industry. And it's really frustrating. And I think you're bringing up a good point on it's not only the dollars lost and how much you have to work to recover those dollars. Back because when you lose a chargeback, you're not just losing your margin, you're losing the entire amount. But it's also the frustration of, I provided my goods and service properly, I did everything I was supposed to, and I still lost the money as a merchant. And it's— and we work with a lot of merchants that there's just a lot of frustration around these chargebacks that they're receiving.

Yeah, like a lot of delivery, especially when the restaurant like does their own delivery, or they take orders over the phone and then it's keyed in. You know, we've told people like, hey, you got to put an online ordering system up so the person's doing address verification, right? And that way you're capturing the address, you're capturing the CVV2 digits, everything's being done correctly. And that way, you know, and then when the person comes in, if they're coming in to pick up the food or you're delivering the food, you have every right to ask to see the card, you know, right?

Show me the card. Or what we see on some apps is, you know, just have them type in a code, for example, that they have to— they got to— they had this so they can verify themselves. There's all these, these additional verifications that, that won't only decrease the amount of chargebacks you'll receive, but when you do receive a chargeback, you have stronger evidence to actually fight the case if your end-user flow is compliant and has the proper verifications in the actual flow. You can use that as strong evidence in your cases.

Yeah, and one of the things that frustrates, like we'll talk to e-commerce merchants and they'll tell us, like, oh, but I shipped this thing and then I'll go Google the address. I'm like, oh, that was a UPS store. This was a freight forwarder. Like, we had somebody recently where I said to the merchant, I go, come on, man, like, what did you— what were you thinking? You got 3 orders all being shipped to the same address, and the person used 3 different names and 3 different credit cards, right? That should have been clue number 1. Like, hey, look at this, we have 3 orders going to this address with 3 different credit cards. That has 3 different names on it.

Yeah.

And not going to the billing address first off, you know. Yeah.

And I think, I think it connects to is what we say to a lot of merchants is it's not only about trying to recover funds from your chargebacks, but it's what you can learn from your chargebacks. So let's take, for example, fraud reason code chargebacks. You're always going to have a percentage of your fraud reason code chargebacks are actually true fraud, and then other ones that are the friendly fraud category, misunderstandings by the cardholders, a cardholder trying to get something for free, saying it wasn't me. Now, you actually, if you can dive into those and understand which ones are true fraud and which ones are friendly fraud, you can uncover fraud rings, uncover what's actually happening with your fraud chargebacks, that maybe there are things that you can improve for your actual fraud rules and your fraud processes if detecting in the future bad transactions before they're actually completed. So there's a lot of insights that we always say to our merchants is, you know, we provide them with a platform of not only seeing what you're recovering, but what insights can you learn from your chargebacks and feedback that are actual actionable insights for your company.

Yeah, we have a client and they sell cigars, but they also— so We, we, we showed them like most of the charges over like $500, they're all, they're all fake, right? Every single one of them were like, there was maybe one real transaction that was real. Okay, so they set the gateway. Now if it's over a certain amount, it just gets authorized and in the queue and then the person working has to You know, they reach out and call the person on the phone and verify, hey, did you order 5 humidors for $3,872? The person never calls back. And then you go in and void it because they didn't do that recently and they let the charge go through. The person didn't call back. 2 days later, they have to do a refund. And, you know, you're paying the juice You know, you're paying your interchange on your sale and, you know, so now you lost that and you didn't even make a sale and you lost whatever, $100 in fees because you didn't— you have to, you have to take the time to like fish out these large orders and make sure you can't just get excited. Oh, we got a large order, right?

And then, yeah, go ahead.

So yeah, you get this large order. Those are the ones, you know, the person, the people who do this stuff, what they do is they'll put in a small order and get you to ship it, you know, and you'll do it. And they might even use their own card, and then they'll put in a big order, and then you'll see like, oh, that's a returning customer, and then you're not checking what's going on, and that's when you get ripped off. And another big thing I saw with getting ripped off recently, which is a 2 old tricks that people brought back was the freight forwarder, where they ship it to a freight forwarder, or the other one is where they contact— and I didn't even know you can do this. So let's say I have a FedEx account, you're shipping me something with FedEx. I can log in to FedEx, take that number, and then I can change the address where it's going to unless the merchant has that blocked where it's not allowed. And, um, yeah, we— there was a couple of merchants that, like, they did not have that blocked off. And the person, somebody was able to get in there and have the stuff sent somewhere else. And the whole, you know, it was a whole scam. And I was like, man, that's just crazy. How did the person figure out that they could do that? But apparently there's some way, if you have a business, a FedEx account that you can go, or UPS account, you can go in and switch where your goods are going. I don't like that. That's, that's kind of like the shipping company, you know, enabling fraud.

Right. And it's crazy. There's so many of those nuances like that that it's pretty crazy that it's still— the system still working that way. For example, the fact that if you, if you're using stolen credit card details or you can just add any name you want on the actual checkout process, and it's not being checked in most scenarios against the issuing bank and what they have. You know, they do an AVS check against the issuing bank. You can do the CVV check, but the actual name on the card is not being checked. So a lot of merchants didn't even know this when we tell them that that's— it's actually— they could be fabricating the names there. So it's really interesting how the systems are still working. In this way. What you're talking about, the velocity or the dollar value, that's if you have too high of a dollar value, then you should do some additional manual checks. I think that's a great point on the transaction side when you're doing, when you're trying to detect fraud. It can also be used on the chargeback side because especially what the way we work is we pull a lot of data from many different sources so the system can make smart decisions. On which arguments to use and in what order to use them. Now, what's interesting is most of the data sources we pull ourselves and there's no lift from the merchant. When we exhaust our data sources, we go to the merchants and say, "These are the data points we'd like from you that if you can provide to us, we can bring the solution to the next level." Now, not all merchants are able to provide that entire list of data points in an automated way. So what we say to them is, "Listen, "Hey, if you could provide these top 6 data points, that would bring us to a great success. However, there's these other 4 data points that are great. When transactions or chargebacks are above $500, $1,000, we hit that." We'll tell them what is that point, the side together. That's when you can manually add those additional data points, 'cause it's worth your team's time to manually go in and add those additional for data points that you can't automate if you can't integrate with our API or do a bulk upload. So there's ways to get around maybe a downside of certain data points are sitting in different systems and it can be challenging to get all the data in to a service provider or to your own system. Like you can choose if you're working internally, you can choose a specific dollar value that it's worth doing the additional manual effort to get additional arguments and data points into your solution.

With larger merchants, you know, they have more sophisticated systems and they're able to do all this. The merchants who get hit the hardest are the SMB merchants. You know, this is their, you know, mom-and-pop business. Maybe they're doing $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, maybe even a couple hundred thousand dollars, right, a month. And they're the ones that get hit the hardest with these, with fraud, because they get excited. Oh, we made a big sale, right? And then they don't like to be— I had a guy once, he told me, he goes, you're preventing me from making a sale. I said, no. I said, you just, you know, you're got a, you know, you're calling me up asking me if I think the transaction is legitimate. I'm telling you that it's fake. And he's like, no, I'm going to ship the stuff anyway. $800 worth of product. 2 days later, chargeback came in. The guy asking us, are you a witch? And I said no. I said, there's, you know, the address— you cannot— anytime you're shipping to like a UPS store, you're just rolling the dice. I mean, I can tell you like 9 times out of 10, that's probably going to be a chargeback. Yeah, yeah, 9 times out of 10, maybe 9.5 times out of 10. You know, you're shipping to a freight forwarding business, you know, that's going to be 100% of the time a chargeback. Yeah, really careful with the addresses. And, you know, I'm, I'm always surprised that, like, um, merchants don't— that there's, like, I don't know because I'm not an e-commerce merchant, but I know larger one— like, we have larger companies, like, doing, you know, a million dollars a month. Believe me, when their orders or, you know, when they push out their orders into the system, all those addresses are being checked against their, like, database. Like, have we ever shipped there before and got a chargeback? Boom, order is voided. You know, somebody's manually going back into the system and voiding out orders, you know. Not— and you don't just void it out in your order system, you have to go to the gateway and void it too. And, and, you know, people a lot of times, merchants don't realize that. They're like, oh, we clicked the order, we voided it in our Word WordPress and their WooCommerce. No, you got to go back to the gateway and also void it out. So, you know, they have to understand like how to, how these systems all tie in together and work. What are you guys doing with AI over there?

Yeah, it's a great question because when we started just back in early 2020, we, we were already at the forefront of technology doing something very different. Than existed on the market. That's why we were an AI-first company even when before this huge mainstream burst of AI and everybody talking about it. So our solution from the beginning was the focus of how do we use technology to tailor each and every response, scale the solution, and improve the solution over time. So what we call the network effect is because we work across so many different industries with top enterprise companies and show better win rates. The idea is to continually improve the win rate. So we, let's say, get to a 60, 70, 80% win rate for a merchant or for an area of types of reason codes. We look at subcategories where we're only at 5, 10, 15%, and then we run A/B tests on those scenarios and whatever, because we're not working off of templates and just testing two different templates, For a merchant, we're testing a scenario and arguments in that scenario. Whatever is learned in that scenario is inputted into the core of JAWS, and the system learns that all merchants that fall in that scenario are now gonna receive the updates and the improvements. So the system is testing and improving over time. That being said, with where technology has been going, we're today doing things that we thought were only gonna be years down the road that would be part of the Just solution. So AI and the revolution that's been happening has been allowing us to do even more today. So I'll give a few examples. What we were doing before, uh, Agentic AI was we were focused on structured data. We had to have standardized structured data to do our tests, to run our improvements. And today what's so cool is we can use unstructured data and already run tests and improve the system. So for example, now we can use customer support communication and have the system decide when is customer support communication relevant for a specific case and when is it not relevant, and when should you actually add in, and what parts of the communication should you add in. Also looking at issuer responses. When you lose a chargeback, an issuer actually writes a letter why they don't accept that chargeback. And for many acquirers and PSPs, you can actually pull out those responses And with the AI revolution today, we can actually analyze those responses and learn why our responses are not being accepted and how we can improve the core arguments so that we'll improve and get more responses ruled in our merchant's favor in the future. So there's a lot of cool things that are allowing us to advance a lot faster because of the AI revolution. And we're really excited about being at the forefront of technology and showing what it could do to top enterprise companies.

Yeah, one thing is like two things like really get merchants down is one, I always tell people like you have to have a cancellation fee on your— a cancellation button on your site so that people can cancel like recurring orders and things like that and take care of it. That's always a huge problem. I just read like a post where somebody said they tried to cancel and the company keeps charging them and they change their credit card and they get charged. And I was explaining to the person like, yeah, that company's probably using credit card updater in their software from the gateway. And the other thing that we discuss with merchants frequently is shipping times. And I go, I tell people, I go, if you do The longer it takes for you to ship your product, the more likelihood you're going to get a chargeback. So if you're shipping and you say, okay, you're going to get it in 2 or 3 days— Need cash flow now? Smart invoicing from MPS One lets your customers pay instantly from their phone or email. No excuses, no delays. Get paid today. Click the link in the description. Days than it needs to be 2 to 3 days. So, you know, maybe you say 2 to 4 days so the person knows, oh, I'm expecting this in 4 days. It gets there beforehand, they're happy, right? But then on the 4th or 5th day, the product doesn't get there. You know, you have to be, you know, answering, you know, you have to have a phone that's being answered. You need to have communication. Like with your shipping to the customer so they could see the tracking number. And if you're going to ship something and it's going to take like 4 to 6 weeks to get to somebody, there's a much higher likelihood they're going to want to cancel the order. They're going to get buyer's remorse. They're going to decide they don't want it, and then they're going to do a chargeback.

Yeah, and I think you're bringing up such a great point because it's not only about fighting your chargebacks, it's how do you prevent future chargebacks from happening, especially future legitimate chargebacks, because you can prevent a lot of these legitimate chargebacks. Especially, we always talk to our merchants about their terms and conditions. Make your terms and conditions and your return policy very clear and concise. So what that will allow is merchants will have more of their consumers coming to them to deal with an actual issue instead of going directly to their issuing bank. To post a chargeback. But also when a chargeback comes in, if you have very clear terms and conditions and how you can do a refund and when you're entitled to cancel your subscription, for example, then you can use that as evidence in your actual documentation and increase your chances of winning those cases. But it's very important not only to have clear terms and conditions, but also make sure your customer is agreeing to those terms and conditions during the checkout process so that they— it shows that they've actually approved them and they can go into those terms and conditions and read everything that they're agreeing to in the process.

Yeah, like having checkboxes when you're checking out, oh, sale items, you know, no returns, no refunds, you know, on clearance items or special orders, and have the checkboxes there so the person is checking it and they know. Make sure it's not in like the smallest font. Don't use like number 6 font, you know what I mean, that no one can read. You know, you got to have it where it's, it's very clear so they know. Because I tell merchants all the time, I go, you know, if something takes 4 weeks to get to the person, yeah, you, you're just rolling the dice. The longer, you know, future delivery of service, that You know, like during COVID everybody started to try to open up all these dropshipping companies. All this stuff is being dropshipped from China. And I remember I ordered something and on a website and I was like, man, that's really weird. This is like, I thought I'm getting this stuff in like a week, right? Never shows up. I call the merchant, they don't answer. They're, you know, not answering their phone. Finally, I just go to my credit card, I do a chargeback. So fast forward about 5 months later, this arrives from China. I'm like, what? I didn't even say it was coming from China. Said it was— said it was in Texas, and this stuff is coming from China. And it got— I was like, I don't even want this now. It's 5 months, 5 months later, already bought it somewhere else. Yeah, I got it, I guess, for free. It was on the way, but I had no way of knowing that because it said coming in 2 to 4 days and never showed up.

Yeah, it's a great point because you really need to not only make things clear, but also make sure you're compliant according to the card scheme rules. And the card schemes change their rules. I'll take an example of the subscription space back in 2020 and 2021. Visa changed their subscription rules and MasterCard did something similar in 2022. And, and, and it's interesting to see that because there's so many chargebacks in the subscription space and there's the negative billing that happens where you give a free subscription for, let's say, 7 days or a month trial, and then you start charging the card right after that. Now you have to provide all of these email notifications before the initial charge and before every charge happens and show the consumer during the checkout process that they're going to be charged after X amount of days. And if you're compliant with these rules, it will decrease your chargebacks in the first place because it'll decrease the amount of confusion you'll have from your consumers. And then when the chargeback does come in, you have stronger evidence because you were compliant based off of the card scheme rules. So really important to stay up to the rule changes. Visa, Mastercard come out with nuanced rule changes twice a year, and they come out with major rule changes every few years. Visa came out with CE 3.0 in 2023. Mastercard did something similar with First Party Trust in 2024 around fraud chargebacks. So knowing these new rules can make your chargeback solution, solution most up to date and relevant. But What I saw when I was dealing with templates and running a team of 20 is that every time new rules would change, I'd have to go in and manually update all of these templates and make sure they're up to date. And that was a process in itself. And that's why dynamic arguments and the way that we work allow us to scale the actual industry knowledge. So when one of our industry experts finds out about a new rule, they're in, they're researching what's happening in industry, they can update a core argument into the Jost platform, and then all merchants that fall under that scenario receive that update. So it updates the solution at scale instead of going in and manually updating hundreds of templates that can get quite tedious and unscalable and is prone to human error in the process.

Okay, so if you had to give merchants like a few tips, what would be some tips for merchants to follow to protect their business?

Yeah, I'll actually, I'll actually say it now because I'm not, I'm not sure when this recording is going to come out, but we're going right into the holiday season right now and we always see an influx in chargebacks during the holiday season. I'll even share a few stats that we've seen in previous years. We usually see around a 40% increase in chargebacks. From November, beginning of November to end of January. We see the transaction value per chargeback is usually higher during this time, and there's more specifically fraud chargebacks, fraud-level chargebacks during this time. Because of that, it's A, you really need to be having a scalable solution in place to deal with the volumes of chargebacks, but also have something in place to prevent them. So first of all, customer support. Make sure you can handle the volumes that are gonna be coming in during this holiday season and your customer support team can handle those volumes because if you can't handle the volumes, it's gonna turn into a chargeback. We usually see higher amounts of fraud chargebacks, as I mentioned, and a lot of it is true fraud. So make sure your fraud system— because higher volumes, fraudsters like to take advantage of the systems, It's tailored to the volumes that you're going to have coming in during this holiday season. And really, what I mentioned before is relevant across the year: compliant end-user flow, clear terms and conditions, and make sure that your customers have an easy way, if you're working subscription, to cancel their subscription, as you mentioned, Allen, and easily deal with your customer support, which will in turn decrease the amount of chargebacks you get in the first place. And when you do get those chargebacks, make sure you're fighting the right chargebacks, because what we're seeing is now there's fees if you fight and you lose a chargeback. PSPs are charging fees many times because card schemes are— have changed their fees. Now sometimes it doesn't make sense to fight a chargeback, and it's not only about getting the highest win rate, It's keeping your ROI as optimized as possible. So make sure those cases that are not worth fighting, you're not fighting. You're focusing on the cases you should be fighting. We've built the model that decides which cases to fight and which cases aren't worth the merchant's time because we want to keep their ROI as high as possible and their win rates as high as possible. But you really need to understand those nuances, understand your fees so that you can make the right decisions, especially when volumes increase through the holiday.

I had recently sit with a merchant and I'd explain to them the different— they wanted to know what a collaboration letter was, a chargeback letter, a retrieval request, and pre-arbitration. Why they call it pre-arbitration? Is beyond me. And you never get a letter back. You'll get a— occasionally we'll see a letter that comes through, and it'll say— it doesn't say, oh, you won the chargeback. It never says that to the merchant. There's always some convoluted language. Oh, we have, uh, we debited your account, now we credited it back, but the cardholder still has rights. But I'd explain all that. Yeah, the pre-arbitration process, it used to be um, a couple hundred bucks a year. I mean, I'm doing this 25 years, okay? So there used to be no pre-arbitration. Now it's up to— it was about— it was about $400, and then it went to $500, now it's $600. So I tell merchants, like, do not sign that pre-arbitration thing unless you think you're gonna win. But some people will go at it, you know, they'll they'll regurgitate the same chargeback 3 or 4 times. We see it a lot with nightclubs. Somebody goes in, blows 5, 10 grand, and then they start, you know, the first one, I wasn't there. The second one, I didn't like it. The third time around, another reason. And I see sometimes even in letters with e-commerce, the person will list like the complaint will be one thing.. But then in the information, you'll see 3 or 4 other complaints, and that all has to be addressed. The days of just a receipt and your gateway receipt and a delivery receipt going, yeah, they ordered, we delivered, that's not enough anymore.

Yeah, Allen, I love where you're taking this because the statuses of chargebacks are quite confusing. You have, like you mentioned, with Visa, you have collaboration chargebacks and you have allocation chargebacks, and they have different statuses. And you have the MasterCard flow and you have the Amex flow. And understanding your statuses of chargebacks are one of the hardest challenges that we see for merchants in the market, because even each PSP shows your statuses in a different way. And then how do your fees work with your statuses? I'm actually going to be in MRC Vegas next year in 2026. I'm going to be on stage with Microsoft and Optimized Payments focusing on— we're going to be doing basically a mythbuster around chargeback statuses. Just what you mentioned, a lot don't understand that if you go to arbitration and you lose, you can get with Visa that $600 fee. You're going to go to arbitration on cases that are worth $40, $50. You really have to be confident if you're going to do that, that you're going to win those cases. So you really have to understand all the stages. What is considered a one case too? We see many merchants say, oh, we have a really high win rate. We have a 70% win rate because they're calling the cases that go to representation because they get the funds back when it's a representation. They're calling that a one case. But then we have to explain to them that's an initial credit to your account because it went to representation. If it goes to pre-arbitration, you're going to lose those funds again. So you can't call the case won at representation. It's like being in a basketball game in the halftime, being up 5 points and saying you won the game. You didn't win anything at halftime. The game's not over. So really understanding your statuses and when you should call a case won and when is it— when you get to a certain stage, it doesn't make sense to continue the process.

Yeah, on our new platform, we actually So when somebody logs into the platform, it's where they sign up. So that's where they're doing their merchant account. So we automated the merchant boarding. Then afterwards they're logging in the same place and they can see authorizations, settlements, deposits. And then there is a chargeback area because we API to Merlink and they can see all their— if they get a chargeback, it appears there and they don't have to fax stuff in. They can hit a button and actually upload all the documents, type in whatever they want to type there, or upload a letter. So it's all like automated for them to do it. They don't have to deal with that. But we'll get calls all the time. Hey, I see this chargeback in here and I clicked on it and then it has all this thing. I'm like, yeah, it says under review. That's it. It's under review. They're like, how long can it stay like that? I can, you know, it can stay like that sometimes for a long time. Under review. I don't even— I just think that the— from a card-present standpoint, I don't think banks should be allowed this. I think that— I think they should send out a retrieval request first before they go to chargeback if the chip hit the machine, and that's it. And that, you know, that rule needs to be changed to protect the retail restaurant merchants like that. And the other thing is I think that they need to use all the companies— Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover— need to have one language for the merchants to understand, like, what is happening, because it's not fair. You see one thing from one company, another from another company. And I think that they need to also be put on a timetable, like, okay, the merchant has 7 days to send it in and they have X amount of time to make their decision and they can't just go on. We had a chargeback once on American Express that lasted— the fight lasted 6 months. Yeah, not fair. The merchant was out like $40 grand. They won. I mean, they had a video of the guy in the place that said we had to put a— get the video, put it on a thumb drive. FedEx it to American Express, and they finally, you know, they've, you know, they got— they just, you know, it was just a fight, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom. Everybody's taking punches, and, you know, you just had to roll with it, roll with the duck, you know, you're just going back and forth, and it's a lot for the merchants. So if merchants want to find out more about your company, where do they go?

Yeah, they could go to our website, uh, just.ai. Uh, yes, it's just.ai. Uh, we'd be happy to discuss more, uh, and provide insights. We even do a just a 12-month analysis of your chargebacks today, provide you with insights of where you're currently at with your chargebacks, and see if there's an opportunity for us to provide you with any uplift or added benefit to what you're doing.

And then you, you guys are also doing all the alerts, RDR, Ethica, Verify.

So we work with both Verify and Ethica, RDR, Ethica Alerts, CDRN, provide all of those solutions and we use them in a way where it's not just sell this and use these alerts. We work with the merchants and see when it's relevant to use the alerts. Because when you use those solutions, it means that you refunded the case and basically lost the chargeback. So it's good if you're close to or past the limits of the ratios like VAMP to use those, but also know when you should actually fight the chargeback and try to recover the funds.

Right. Okay. And do you guys partner with, you know, organizations to refer business to you and things like that?

Of course.

Yeah, we have a lot of listeners in the business. So besides merchants.

Yeah, we have partnerships with many of the top anti-fraud solutions in the market, with acquiring banks and payment processors. For example, Worldpay today has their own chargeback solution called Defender. That is the Joust partnership. Joust means many of the solutions in the market today because they want to use the the top product around chargebacks. It's the JustBrain behind— being white-labeled behind the scenes.

Oh wow, that's really cool.

Yeah, so we have some really cool partnerships happening and growing out our partnership side and working with a lot of the top enterprise companies in the market.

All right, so if you're a merchant or you're in the business and you want to find out more from Ronan, uh, go to his website, reach out, get a demo. And check out Just AI. And thank you for joining us on the show today. You can follow B2BVault on LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn. Ronan, you're on LinkedIn too?

Of course, you can follow me on LinkedIn as well.

All right, you can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast app. And also you can watch the video on YouTube. Some people like YouTube. And check us out, B2BVault. Carpe diem. Peace out, everybody, and thank you for listening.