Overview: The growth conundrum 

The payments industry is transforming fast with an increased drive to leverage cutting-edge technologies. There is a renewed focus in the post-pandemic world to optimize the entire dispute management funnel to reduce risk at all stages of a transaction lifecycle, improve compliance and ensure a higher level of customer satisfaction.  

Disputes are a part and parcel of any card transaction. With the rising use of online payments and e-commerce transactions, complexities in various customer-facing processes, especially disputes and chargebacks, demand solutions beyond the traditional approaches and require extremely efficient processes to meet and exceed the customer expectations. Moreover, an increase in the volume of transactions as well as payment frauds can add to the woes of payment processing businesses.  

The key is to ensure a delicate balance between elevating customer experience through personalization and innovating at speed & scale through process optimization. This is where a sound legacy system modernization and business platform integration can make a huge difference. However, having mission-critical applications on a monolithic legacy architecture can hinder the implementation of the new-age technology. 

A multinational payment processing corporation sought assistance for significant challenges with their legacy dispute management system, which included rising costs, inefficient workflows, low productivity, and limited customer service capabilities. Bitwise helped them in transforming their legacy dispute management system into a modernized, cloud-native agile system capable of managing today’s consumer expectations and meeting potential demands of the future. 

The Challenges: Limiting legacy application 

The challenges posed by legacy technology systems and applications outweigh their stability advantages, compared to their modern counterparts powered by cloud technologies. For a payment processing company with a global presence, the need for agility is ultra-critical, given the frequently changing mandates and compliance factors across diverse geographies. Additionally, in the dispute management funnel, siloes created by legacy systems block visibility into all stages of a dispute and rarely offer an efficient and engaging self-service model for customers.  

The Bitwise client faced the following key challenges which prompted the pursuit of a more future-proof, resilient, and agile dispute management system: 

• The monolithic legacy dispute management applications continued to incur high maintenance and licensing costs.
• Working with legacy applications resulted in long lead times that led to decreased productivity and ROI. 
• Frequent and expensive upgrades to card brand mandates hampered the overall performance. 
• Despite having a high-cost BPM suite, their system lacked overall flexibility and configurability. 

In addition to the above, the legacy system posed challenges in real-time, data-driven decision making, efficient case segmentation & prioritization, and negatively affected time-to-market for innovations and value-added services for their customers.

The Client Perspective: Why Bitwise 

Using a digital approach to transform mission-critical mainframe systems rife with complexities, dependencies, and fractured workflows across different geographies is no easy task. It necessitated a value partner with extensive expertise who can strategize the transformation journey, execute the plan flawlessly and become an extension of the organization’s culture.  

The following Bitwise capabilities persuaded the client that their business needs and transformation vision for a modernized credit card payment dispute management system could be realized efficiently and effectively: 

• 24+ years of experience in niche technologies 
• A handpicked pool of industry experts from diverse capabilities 
• Deep technology and domain expertise in complex industries 
• Focus on innovation & research to close the gaps of market practices  
• Wide range of comprehensive data-driven digital services & solution suites 
• An agile, goal-driven framework for change & workflow management  

The Solution: Re-engineering applications with cloud-native 

Modernizing the legacy credit card payment dispute management system required creating a highly resilient digital ecosystem that is capable of managing the entire dispute journey while removing the old redundancies. It also entailed reimagining the process for desired agility, balancing pre- as well as post-dispute factors, and predicting process outcomes with optimum accuracy using new data and digital capabilities. 

Bitwise offered a strategic solution design approach to deconstruct the existing legacy dispute management applications and re-engineer them on the cloud with open-source tools & agile methodologies.  

The Bitwise solution utilized the best of cloud, AI-ML, and DevOps practices to power the client’s vision of a modernized dispute management process. It also helped the client leverage cloud-agnostic applications to ensure better customer satisfaction while enabling stakeholders to be more flexible and agile.  

Key features of the Bitwise solution: 

• A highly configurable, maintainable, and omnichannel solution consisting of microservices, decoupled base architecture, and cloud services.
• API-based communication to constantly evolve card schemes via Real-Time System Interface (RTSI) as well as batch processing.
• No-trust mechanism for every service or communication gateway for enhanced security.
• Automated build and deployment on Google Cloud Platform with the flexibility to switch between cloud providers with minimal changes.
• Use of machine learning to predict the probability of winning a dispute.
• Auto-allocation and prioritization of dispute cases leveraging machine learning based on winning probability, time, value & size of disputes etc. 
• Use of rules engine for automated case resolution for faster processing and less manual efforts.

The Result: A future-proof dispute management ecosystem 

The modernized application portfolio helped the multinational payment processing business to streamline their dispute management processes, roll out innovations quickly, and provide a streamlined, hassle-free experience for their customers. The client was able to improve the way conflicts were handled with an efficient dispute management solution, giving them a competitive edge.   

As envisioned by the client, Bitwise ensured the following key benefits: 

• Consistent user experience across the client’s software-driven technology assets  
• Cost-efficient operations with a significant reduction in maintenance costs 
• Easy cloud portability to suitably adapt applications and data environment 
• Collection of test evidence to meet compliance audit requirements 
• Increased visibility into factors leading to disputes 
• 360-degree view of the dispute management process 

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