I had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas Carrara, representing the Scheme and Operational Compliance Team at Viseca in Switzerland. The team has 20 years of combined experience in various roles and responsibilities in the payment industry. Viseca is one of the leading card issuers (debit and credit cards) and issuing service providers for Kantonalbanken, Raiffeisen Group, Migrosbank, Bank Cler and several regional banks.

How is the scheme compliance process organised at Viseca?

As a licensee of Mastercard & Visa, Viseca has a dedicated team called scheme and operational compliance, taking care of both scheme compliance and operational compliance.

We, as the Scheme and Operational Compliance team, are the second line of defence. One of our primary responsibilities involves analysing newly announced scheme rules as well as updates and adjustments to the existing rules, distributing them to all relevant stakeholders (internal & external) and supporting them in implementing the changes to stay compliant.

What challenges did you have in managing the scheme compliance process?

One of the biggest challenges was the workload. The process in place consisted of many manual steps. We had to download the announcements from individual scheme portals, review them one by one, upload them to other sharing platforms to distribute them to relevant stakeholders and keep track of the progress in a spreadsheet. The manual process, the steadily increasing number of announcements published by the schemes, having to involve more and more stakeholders due to the ever-expanding complexity of all the topics resulted in a massive workload for the team.

Since the scheme announcements are a crucial part of the Mastercard and Visa rules and regulations, which we need to be compliant with as a licensee, one of our main responsibilities and objectives is continuous stakeholder education. As a significant amount of our working hours have been spent with administrative work, too many hours really, we realised that being able to provide the service we want and need to provide to all the involved stakeholders as well as fulfilling our various other tasks would soon be virtually impossible in the current setup. We also saw no potential to improve the existing process further and came to the conclusion that we need to scan the market for a new solution that fits all our needs. Primarily means less manual labour for the team, of course, and ideally an all-in-one solution.

Why did you decide to use Kajo?

We saw the need to improve the manual work we had to do as a team, especially since other topics required our attention and time.

When we were presented with the opportunity to get Kajo, we realised that with Kajo, we would be able to maintain the workforce we have in the team and still be able to manage the increasing workload. We were faced with the choice of either automating the processes with Kajo or adding additional FTEs to the team as the workload would have no longer been manageable.

What process & tools were in place before Kajo? And how did Kajo improve the process?

Before Kajo, we had two processes and tools for internal stakeholders and our partner banks.

For internal stakeholders, we misused the JIRA board. However, as JIRA is a generic issue tracking tool, the setup was not tailored and well suited to the scheme compliance process. For the partner banks, we used a file-sharing portal to send them the PDFs together with additional files and maintained an excel spreadsheet for the overview. As a result, we had to keep two separate processes and tools, which was very labour intensive.

Now with Kajo, we manage everything in one place. Internally, Kajo is clearly positioned as a scheme compliance management tool, and everyone who is a stakeholder uses Kajo for this process. For our partner banks, we have integrated Kajo into the service portal using Kajo sync ability with ServiceNow. Therefore, we can exchange with them via Kajo and receive their feedback in Kajo. This has made our life much easier as we can now manage all internal and external stakeholders in Kajo only.

Another advantage of Kajo is the managed service. Rivero takes care of many administrative parts of the process: Downloading and reviewing the new scheme announcements, uploading them to Kajo, providing guidance on each bulletin, and identifying the right stakeholders for each announcement. We just need to review and confirm the assigned stakeholders. The administrative part alone has been a considerable workload relief for us.

What was your first impression of Kajo?

If you have been a scheme compliance manager for a while, you can quickly realise that the people behind Kajo deeply know and understand this process and that knowledge is mirrored in the product. The product is clean and tidy. You don’t have things you do not need.

The interface is user-friendly and easy to work with, making the onboarding very easy.

Another aspect of Kajo that we would like to highlight is the Kajo Expert Guidance provided by Rivero Scheme Compliance Experts. We found this very helpful and valuable in interpreting and understanding what is requested by the schemes.

How was the user onboarding & training for Kajo?

All we did for user onboarding was to provide the stakeholders with a short and straightforward manual, and that was it. Onboarding people to Kajo went very smoothly for two reasons:

• Kajo has a user-friendly interface which makes it very easy to use, and therefore no training is required.
• Kajo is specifically designed for the scheme compliance process, and therefore there is not much one can do there. This simplicity is an excellent advantage as it makes Kajo straightforward and does not raise many questions.

What do you appreciate the most about Kajo?

With Kajo, we can focus our time and expertise on the actual work rather than the admin part of the process, which takes up so much time. In addition, having the Kajo Expert Guidance has been very helpful for us. It is always valuable to read the interpretation of other experts to see if we have the same understanding of a topic, and Kajo Expert Guidance provides us with that.

How was your experience working with Rivero?

It’s been a great experience working with Rivero. The response time is very short. If we have ideas for product improvement, the product owner gladly takes them to the backlog to be implemented without additional costs. This is very different from the usual change request model in our industry. Having worked with several partners and suppliers, the customer orientation and customer-focused approach of Rivero is very refreshing.

What would you say to other businesses facing the same challenges in the scheme compliance process?

We have been lucky enough to recommend Kajo & Rivero as a partner to a couple of banks. And if I want to put it in one sentence, I would say: Just go for it. Kajo will make your life much easier, as simple as that. Any player working in the payment industry will greatly benefit from using Kajo.

To know more about Kajo, visit our website.

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How Kajo Can Actually Empower Anyone in the Payment Industry was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An Interview with Daniela Franzin, Head Dispute and Claim Resolution at Viseca Card Services SA

Daniela Franzin started her career in the payment industry in 1987. Since the beginning, she has been focused mainly on risk management and risk operations, including fraud, fraud prevention, disputes, debt collection and debt management. Throughout her career, she has led several chargeback teams on both the issuing and acquiring sides. Currently, she is Head of Dispute and Claim Resolution at Viseca Card Services SA in Switzerland.

What are the main challenges you see in the chargeback process?

In the chargeback process, we are constantly working against time. Therefore, the primary challenge of every chargeback team lead is to enable the team to process more disputes in less time.

Analysing a dispute goes through a few steps, like getting a cardholder statement, preparing the documents, submitting the chargebacks and communicating with the cardholder. All these have to be done on time to meet the chargeback timeline and keep the cardholder updated about the latest status. Failing to do so means losses for card issuers and additional customer calls for the chargeback team.

What makes the ideal chargeback solution from your perspective?

As mentioned, the chargeback process consists of collecting cardholder statements, preparing the documents, submitting the chargebacks, crediting and communicating with the cardholder. While most chargeback tools cover the “submission” part of the process, for me, an ideal chargeback solution should bring all these parts together. Only then can the team work efficiently without switching between several systems and media break between the team and the cardholder.

What makes a chargeback team efficient is to be able to:

1. interact easily with cardholders for collecting cardholder statements and follow-ups;
2. automate the creation of chargeback cases;
3. submit several chargebacks in one go;
4. automate side processes, such as a cardholder account adjustment and cardholder communication about the status of their dispute.

These tasks can take tremendous time, which can be better invested in analysing more chargebacks and not missing the timelines.

Why did Viseca Card Services choose amiko over other alternative chargeback solutions?

The first time I saw the very first version of amiko, I could tell that the product had been designed and developed with operational issues in mind. It was apparent that the people who have built this solution understand the chargeback process and challenges the card issuers are facing in the process.

In addition, we appreciate the open approach of Rivero in involving customers in product development. From the beginning, we have been actively engaged with Rivero. The Rivero team always takes our ideas and suggestions seriously, which we often do not experience in this domain.

What was your first experience working with amiko?

amiko is the easiest to use chargeback solution I have ever seen. I had 45-minutes of training a few months before we went live. The first time I logged in to amiko, I did not need to get back to the training materials to find my way around the interface. amiko is extremely user friendly, intuitive and self-explanatory, and for a chargeback team lead, there is nothing more important than easy team training. Whenever we onboard new team members, we spend about 1.5 hours sitting with them, letting them work with amiko and just giving them some tips. After that session, they can work independently and without additional training.

Another thing that excites me about amiko is how efficient and fast we can work. The user interface is truly designed to do way more with fewer clicks and in much less time. Also, several features such as bulk case creation (to create hundreds of cases at once) and bulk chargeback submission (to submit several chargebacks at once) save us a lot of time and effort.

What do you enjoy or appreciate the most about amiko?

In my career in the chargeback domain, I have worked with several chargeback applications. However, I have never seen a solution that includes everything. So basically, with amiko, you have it open in the browser, and then you have everything you need right there. Whether you want to communicate with the cardholder, see the transaction details, prepare the documentation, submit the chargebacks or make the cardholder account adjustment, they can all be done in one place. Together with a user-friendly and self-explanatory interface, these capabilities make working with amiko and onboarding new team members very easy.

Do you have any results on the efficiency gain to share with us?

We calculated how much time it takes for a chargeback analyst to submit a regular chargeback (with a common reason code) in 3 different chargeback systems: 1) the chargeback application we used before, 2) the portal of one of the payment networks and 3) amiko.

In our calculation, we also considered the time spent on all preparation needed before submitting the chargeback. The result showed that a chargeback analyst can handle double the amount of chargebacks with amiko compared to the industry-leading chargeback solution. Comparing amiko with the chargeback portal of a payment network, we can process 2.5 times more chargebacks during the same time it takes on the portal of a payment network.

The efficiency gain becomes even more significant when comparing the time spent to submit multiple chargebacks on the same card, which is quite common, especially for fraud-related chargebacks. Contrary to other chargeback systems, with amiko, there is no need for repetitive steps, meaning handling ten or more chargebacks takes the same time as handling a single one.

In our calculations, we focused on the process in the back office (analysing and submitting). For example, we did not consider the time it takes to communicate with the cardholder or make the account adjustment. Taking those into account, I expect the efficiency to increase even more, especially once we roll out the amiko bi-directional cardholder channel and self-servicing.

What is the next feature of amiko that you will roll out? And how do you expect that helps you even more?

We will roll out the bi-directional channel between the cardholder and the chargeback analysts in a few months. I expect that it will improve the efficiency even more in two ways:

1. We can communicate and collect the required information from the cardholder much faster via digital channels.
2. Whenever the cardholder starts a dispute from the app, the created dispute case will have all the information (documents, reason codes) needed to be submitted to the payment network. For common chargeback cases (e.g., no cardholder authorisation), such disputes can potentially be directly submitted to the payment network without the involvement of the back-office team. Therefore, the team can focus on more complex dispute cases.

We believe this next step will increase the efficiency of our teams even more. Of course, we will closely monitor how opening such a channel can impact the chargeback volume. To do this gradually, we will start with the back-office initiated cases first, where we reach out to the cardholders for additional input via the digital channel. In the next step, we will then open up the self-servicing part.

How was your experience with the integration project and working with Rivero?

I have one word for it, Excellent! It’s great to talk to people who know what they are doing.

I have years of experience working with service providers explaining the business needs and operational challenges in the chargeback domain. With Rivero, it has been effortless. We feel that the people building amiko have a deep understanding of the chargeback domain and listen carefully to the needs and wishes of their customers.

Would you recommend amiko to other card issuers? Why?

I would certainly recommend any card issuers to have a serious look at amiko and invest in this outstanding solution. I think sooner or later, every card issuer needs to start looking into efficiency, and chargeback is one of those processes with great potential. Therefore, I am confident that investment in solutions like amiko will undoubtedly pay off, both from efficiency and improvement of cardholder experience in this process.

Please check our website to learn more about Amiko.

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How Amiko Doubles Chargeback Efficiency? Why is it Only The Beginning? was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To know more about Amiko, check our website.

If you like this article and want to read more, follow us on LinkedIn and Medium.

Chargeback Process: Six Ways For Card Issuers to Gain Efficiency was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To know more about Kajo, check our website.

If you like this article and want to read more, follow us on LinkedIn and Medium.

Mastercard & Visa Compliance was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The majority of transaction disputes are believed to be caused by fraudulent card usage (1). Among those, the so-called “friendly fraud” or “family fraud” is considered to be the 3rd most significant cause for eCommerce disputes (2).

Actual fraud is when an illegitimate third party has misused the cardholder’s payment information in a purchase. However, friendly fraud is when a cardholder initiates a dispute on a transaction they have authorised but forgotten or if a family member performed the transaction without the cardholder’s knowledge. While friendly frauds occur across industry sectors, for digital goods & services, up to 90% of all disputes can be caused by friendly fraud (2).

According to Mastercard, card issuers and merchants incur $15–70 in operational cost for every dispute. Given the costs, operational challenges, and impacts on the relationship with cardholders, issuers have strong incentives to prevent disputes, especially the unjustified ones that resulted from friendly fraud (1).

How Can Issuers Prevent Friendly Fraud?

Several measures could help issuers in preventing friendly fraud. In this short post, we specifically focus on two approaches we find the most effective.

1) Challenging the cardholder in case of friendly fraud indications

From an issuer point of view, more and more cardholders are becoming aware of the “zero liability policy” of card payments and therefore know about their dispute rights. A good dispute experience can encourage more frequent payments and position a card as “top of the wallet”. However, making it too easy for cardholders to dispute legitimate and authorised transactions can lead to unjustified disputes, such as friendly fraud, which hurts the whole payment ecosystem (2).

To avoid the operational costs of submitting the chargeback and handling the somewhat likely objections (in the form of a 2nd presentment or pre-arbitration) from the acquiring bank, it makes sense to challenge the cardholder in case of friendly fraud indicators. Some indicators are previous, undisputed purchases at the same merchant, card on file transactions, and digital goods purchases at eCommerce platforms such as app stores.

To balance challenging the cardholder while at the same time maintaining a good relationship with cardholders, having detailed insights on the transaction can provide additional and more substantial indicators.

2) Provide detailed insight on transaction data

In most cases, friendly fraud is raised out of not recognising a transaction. The cardholder raises a dispute simply because they have forgotten about the transaction, the merchant name is misleading, or they are unaware that a family member has performed the transaction. Issuers can avoid this by providing more detailed information on the transaction to help the cardholder identify it or trigger a conversation within the family.

Thanks to platforms like Ethoca (a Mastercard company) and Verifi (a Visa company), it is now possible to provide cardholders with rich and detailed information on a transaction. For example, an alternative merchant name, the merchants’ logo, contact and address details or information about the device used for the purchase. In addition, for some merchants, it is even possible to retrieve a digital receipt, which contains information about the goods or services that have been purchased. All of which can help the cardholder to remember the transaction and avoid proceeding with a dispute.

Ethoca (Consumer Clarity API) and Verifi (Order Insight and Order Insight Digitals APIs) provide issuers with much more detailed transaction data from the merchant side. Issuers can leverage the data provided from the merchant side to provide more detailed transaction information in the app or digital channel to reduce cardholder’s confusion about a transaction. In addition to educating the cardholder, integrating such information in the issuer’s application landscape can empower the call centre agents to validate better and/or confirm a fraudulent transaction when talking to the cardholder.

What Role Do Payment Schemes Play in All That?

In a recent announcement, one of the international payment schemes released an announcement that strongly recommends a new way for merchants to share their digital logo with the scheme so that issuers can display it to their cardholders for an improved experience with billing and dispute resolution. For issuers, it will become mandatory to display merchant logos in digital channels. This requirement can be seen as the first step in this direction, and we can expect more of it in the future.

How Can Issuers Provide Such Information in Their Digital Channels and Internal Applications Systems?

There are several ways to leverage the additional merchant information. One way is that issuers directly integrate with the existing APIs offered by Ethoca and Verifi in their digital channels, chargeback and back-office systems.

Another approach (perhaps a lighter & quicker approach) is to use off-the-shelf solutions that leverage such APIs. For example, using a fraud/chargeback dispute solution with direct integration with Ethoca and Verifi can simplify the integration effort in the digital channels of the issuer.

Our Mission Towards a Holistic Fraud & Chargeback Solution

At Rivero, we believe that a holistic view of the fraud and dispute process is needed to make the process more efficient and effective. By design, our fraud & chargeback solution, amiko, considers all aspects of the chargeback process from prevention to cardholder self-servicing, process automation, and digitalisation. amiko integrates with the latest industry solutions to offer the best experience and capabilities to issuers.

If you like to know more about amiko and how it covers different aspects of a fraud and dispute process, please check our website and get in touch.

If you like this article and want to read more, follow us on LinkedIn and Medium.

How Issuers Can Prevent Friendly Fraud: A Fusion of Data & Technology was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In our previous post, we wrote about the importance of chargebacks for card payments and how cardholder self-servicing can turn chargebacks into a pleasant experience for cardholders.

This post focuses on how issuing banks and processors can improve efficiency in the chargeback process by automation and end-to-end digitalisation.

Why is it essential to improve the efficiency of the chargeback process?

The volume of chargebacks is increasing.

With the rapid growth of e-commerce and the increasing number of purchases with debit and credit cards, the volume of fraud and dispute chargebacks are increasing (1, 2). While the pandemic had a big impact, disputes were increasing even before COVID-19 (3, 4). Therefore, an efficient process with quality assurance to handle the increasing volume of disputes is essential for the continuity of this process.

Most issuers agree that their existing internal processes and chargeback solutions used do not allow the process to run efficiently, and thus they are looking into improving it (5). Without an improvement in the process and tooling, there is a risk of loss (e.g., increased write-offs) and increasing personnel costs (6).

Chargeback is a time-sensitive process.

Every step of a chargeback life cycle (from issuer-merchant collaboration (Ethoca & Verifi) to Arbitration) has a timeframe and a deadline. The better issuing banks can optimize the process, the faster and more efficient the chargeback team can work. As a result, fewer deadlines are missed, and the issuer will bear less loss (from write-offs).

A better chargeback experience translates into improved cardholder satisfaction.

An efficient dispute and fraud process can enhance customer service and enable issuing banks to stay ahead of the competition. In addition, with an efficient process, the protection offered by chargebacks can be highlighted more prominently as an advantage of card payment, leading to card portfolio and transaction volume growth.

How to improve efficiency & save cost in the chargeback process?

We identified six areas that the issuing banks can work on to improve the efficiency of the chargeback process.

1. Go end-to-end digital: Digitalising the process cannot be achieved by merely providing a digital version of the dispute form in your app or portal. Issuing banks should offer cardholder self-servicing that can guide cardholders to raise a valid and complete dispute.
2. Automate side processes: Whether it’s blocking a card, issuing a replacement card, triggering merchant collaboration, crediting or debiting the cardholder, all of these steps can be automated so that your chargeback team can get more chargebacks done in their time rather than taking care of all side processes for each chargeback.
3. Bulk Decision: There are several scenarios (especially in the fraud domain) where the same task has to be done multiple times (examples: creating new chargeback cases, reporting fraud or submitting chargebacks). Using chargeback tools that can help the team to do a task once for numerous cases will vastly save you time.
4. Make the most out of collaboration platforms: Thanks to merchant collaboration platforms like Ethoca and Verifi, you can now prevent going through the costly chargeback process. Why not move one step further and use such a platform to avoid unnecessary time-consuming chargebacks. Ethoca and Verifi can provide valuable insight about a transaction, which goes way beyond the transaction data. Such insights can be presented in a friendly way to cardholders to help them identify a transaction and avoid raising an unjustified dispute.
5. Think beyond a manual chargeback submission: In many cases, especially fraud chargeback ones with no cardholder identification (so-called non-authenticated card not present), the chargeback case is pretty simple. Why not use such cases to start building automated chargeback submission so that the chargeback team can spend their time and skills on more complex chargebacks.
6. Decouple chargeback from payment processing: Traditionally, most chargeback products require tight coupling with the processing system. Before the schemes enhanced their platforms (VROL and MasterCom) and introduced modern system interfaces a few years ago, the chargeback clearing message had to be prepared/created and transmitted to the Scheme network by the issuer/processor. Therefore, the chargeback processing system was either part of the processing platform or closely connected to it. However, with the enhancement of schemes platforms, it is now possible to decouple chargeback processing from payment processing. With the increasing number of chargebacks, there is a need for improvement, but as long as your chargeback system is tightly integrated with your payment processing, changes and innovation in this area are complex, costly, and time-consuming.

Need a little help?

At Rivero, we have worked on all these areas because we care about improving the chargeback process. Our mission is to make this process as efficient as possible and help issuers cut costs and improve their customer services.

If you would like to know more about our SaaS chargeback product, called amiko (means friend in Esperanto), check our website and get in touch for a demo.

If you like our article and want to read more, follow us on LinkedIn and Medium.

The enormous potential of the chargeback process for efficiency gain: A short guide for Issuing… was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the core aspects of card payments is to comply with license rules (scheme rules and regulations) of international payment networks (e.g. Mastercard, Visa) and the management of scheme fees and interchange rates. Such responsibility is usually taken care of by a so-called scheme compliance manager or a team of scheme compliance experts, depending on the bank’s size.

As implied by the term, scheme compliance entails a critical responsibility: to avoid non-compliance leading to interoperability issues, non-compliance assessments, and financial losses due to not optimal interchange or scheme fees. In extreme cases, overlooking compliance requirements can cause fines and lead to a loss of the scheme licence for a bank.

Scheme Compliance Process and Related Problems as of Today

Despite the importance of the process, today’s approach is often inefficient, time-consuming and important requirements are easily overlooked.

1. Manual process: Most scheme compliance managers spend most of their time communicating new rules and requirements to different departments (e.g., via email) and then chase every individual to collect feedback on the compliance status.
2. High risk of overlooked non-compliance: As a result of a highly manual process, there is a high risk that some requirements or deadlines are missed, the management does not know the compliance status or the compliance status is communicated too late, which all might then result in hefty fines from the payment schemes.
3. Surprises in schemes fees increases: Schemes fees is another aspect of scheme compliance. In the absence of a well-defined process and tool to control it, scheme compliance teams might discover unwanted surprises in fees they were not aware of.
4. Lack of overall card compliance overview: As long as the process is handled manually, preparing a comprehensive compliance overview is a highly challenging task that requires constant updates and maintenance of the overview.
5. Lack of scheme compliance expertise in smaller banks: Many smaller banks do not have a dedicated scheme compliance manager to take care of the process. As a result, it’s either being taken care of by roles such as product manager or project manager. The lack of expertise in such a domain increases, even more, the risk of non-compliance and related fines.
6. High costs of knowledge lost: As long as the process is handled by a few people with customised excel sheets and tacit knowledge of how to do it, banks run the risk of losing such people. Of course, training new people is possible but would typically take a long time due to the lack of knowledge and well-defined processes and tools.

Scheme Compliance of Tomorrow

There is vast potential to improve this process in the digitalisation age and gain control over the scheme compliance with minimal efforts. At Rivero, we have done this with our product, kajo, and now enable our customers to do it differently.

1. Automated process: Most communications can be automated so that the right people will be informed about a new compliance rule or requirements and then provide their feedback on the compliance status and costs in a centralised platform.
2. Reminders and overview to minimise non-compliance: The platform will send reminders to relevant people to provide feedback on a compliance change. In cases of no feedback, the scheme compliance manager can see the non-compliance or pending topics in a dashboard and take action accordingly.
3. Gain control over scheme fees and interchange management: Having an overview of scheme fees and changes would enable scheme compliance managers to see where changes in prices occurred and avoid discovering surprises.
4. Overall card compliance overview: When all the feedback and information are collected on a centralised platform, it is then possible to have an updated overview of the compliance status and fees at any point in time. Besides, such an overview increases transparency in the process and helps uncover the bottlenecks in the process.
5. Remarks on scheme compliance experts on essential rules: The scheme compliance manager can add their viewpoint on a given rule change for the others to read. Besides, in kajo, scheme compliance experts at Rivero also add remarks on important announcements or bulletins to help the banks with limited resources to interpret the rules more confidently.
6. Well-documented knowledge and process: Using a well-defined process and tool reduces the risk of losing knowledge when people leave the employer. Also, it facilitates a faster onboarding of new people.

Want to learn more?

If you are interested in knowing more about kajo and its features, please check the kajo product page and get in touch.

Kajo is a browser-based platform, and you can gain access to it within a day. Hence, you can try it for yourself and decide if it can add value to your scheme compliance framework and related processes.

If you like our article and want to read more, follow us on LinkedIn and Medium.

6 Improvements for a New Approach to Card Scheme Compliance was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Viseca is a leading provider of products and services of cashless payment. This includes the issuing of payment cards (Viseca Card Services SA), the provision of card business services for issuers (Viseca Payment Services SA) and the development of innovative financial management solutions (Contovista). In 2019, revenue was at CHF 544.2 million and net profit was at CHF 58.3 million. Viseca is wholly owned by the largest Swiss cantonal and retail banks. These include all cantonal banks, the Raiffeisen Group, Migros Bank, Bank Cler, regional banks and a number of private and commercial banks.

Viseca’s goal is to provide best in class services for partner banks.

One of the essential services that Viseca is offering to its partner banks is back-office operations, from customer service to fraud and chargeback handling. What is critical for Viseca is to bring efficiency and excellence to these operational processes to provide best in class services to their partner banks.

Fraud and chargeback handling is becoming more and more challenging.

Fraud and chargebacks handling are among the core back-office operations, often neglected when it comes to innovation. Chargeback is one of the fundamental payment processes established by payment networks like Mastercard, Visa, and Amex to protect cardholders in cases of fraud or when there is a problem with the merchant fulfilment of the cardholder’s purchase.

It is becoming more and more difficult for issuers to process an increasing volume of chargebacks driven by the launch of e-commerce capable modern debit cards (Debit Mastercard, Visa Debit) and the overall increase in e-commerce transactions.

According to Nicolas Glück, Senior Risk Specialist at Viseca Payment Services SA, it was nearly impossible to improve the chargeback process with their previous application. He added, “the application was not being further developed and optimized according to our needs, which is no longer in line with today’s requirements in the digital age”.

Modern SaaS solutions help to bring continuous improvements to the chargeback process.

“When looking for a replacement for our existing application, what made us decide for amiko and Rivero as a partner was the trustworthy, creative and engaging relationship that we experienced with Rivero early on. We were actively involved in prioritising functionalities and features that add the most efficiency to our process. The Rivero team was very supportive and flexible to take our needs and priorities into consideration and involve us in such discussions from day one,” Nicolas Glück said.

“Two main factors tipped us in favour of amiko. Firstly, amiko, as a SaaS solution, does not require management and maintenance on our side nor does it require integration with our payment processor. Secondly, having a SaaS solution updated regularly with new features and functions without any effort on our side is completely new in the chargeback world. We realised that such a SaaS solution not only reduces efforts on our side but also removes the need for typical lengthy and costly change requests that we were used to”. Patrick Dessouslavy, Head Operations Risk Management at Viseca Payment Services SA

From an integration point of view, Thomas Herzog, Senior Program and Project Manager at Viseca Payment Services SA, said: “It was the easiest project I have had so far, which is not very typical in our domain. The Rivero team is well-informed about our business and our needs; the project materials and documents were well-prepared. I have never had the experience of having all documentation and information needed to start a project, and that made it very easy for us”. He added that “usually, if you are working with providers of software/SaaS solutions, the technical documentation is available but typically what you don’t have, is the business view. However, in this project, Rivero provided us early on with the business documents and information that was very helpful for us to do our part internally”.

Riccardo Botti, IT Project Manager at Viseca Payment Services SA, added that “getting amiko up and running on the IT side went very smooth and with minimal effort on our side. The solution architecture is designed in such a way that it reduces the IT effort on the issuer side. All we needed to do was to set the configuration and spin-up one server with internet connectivity in our data centre”.

For Viseca, it was important that the launch goes smoothly and the team can get up to speed with amiko quickly. According to Fabio Sulzberger, Head Fraud Operations at Viseca Payment Services SA, “the go-live went very smoothly. The Rivero team was very responsive to resolve any small issues”. Nicolas Glück added, “we had never experienced such a level of communication and responsiveness. Whenever we reported a small issue, it was fixed on the same day or at the latest the next day”. Fabio Sulzberger continues, “everyone in my team is pleased working with amiko; they found the product efficient and user friendly, and they appreciate that they can communicate their wishes for new features and functionalities. Rivero has also been diligent in collecting the team’s feedback and suggestions and putting them on the product roadmap”.

Concerning the product roadmap and future features, Nicolas Glück says that “What I appreciate is that we have an excellent overview of the product roadmap. We know what features are being developed now and what is next on the roadmap, and we can communicate our priorities to Rivero.”

We do not stop in the back-office. The next step is cardholder self-servicing!

Continuous improvement is key to Viseca. “Our partnership with Rivero just started. As a next step, we are looking forward to launching self-servicing to our customers via Viseca’s strong digital channels, “one app” and “one portal”. I am personally very much looking forward to having automation as part of the chargeback handling process. That, together with the cardholder self-servicing, will bring much-needed efficiency to the process and change the chargeback world,” said Nicolas Glück.

“amiko has opened up new doors for us by enabling us to offer digital services in further operational domains, such as handling insurance claims”. Patrick Dessouslavy, Head Operations Risk Management, Viseca Payment Services SA.

Patrick Dessouslavy continues that with Rivero, Viseca will bring more innovative solutions and best-in-class services to their partner banks and their cardholders.

To learn more about Amiko, check our website.

If you like our article and want to read more, follow us on LinkedIn and Medium.

Learn About Viseca Easy & Speedy Integration With a SaaS Chargeback Product — amiko was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Payment networks like Mastercard, Visa, and Amex have established chargeback processes together with a zero liability rule to protect cardholders in cases of fraud or when there is a problem with the merchant fulfilment of the cardholder’s purchase. While the process is in place and the cardholder’s rights are protected, going through a chargeback process is an effortful and sometimes stressful experience for the cardholder.

In this first article of a series on chargebacks, we look into how payment card issuers and /or banks (hereinafter “banks”), can turn these stressful experiences into positive ones and by doing so gain customer loyalty and increase customer’s trust in their payment products.

Today’s chargeback experience for cardholders

Identifying a problem with a transaction

Thanks to the digitalization in banking, most banks are now offering digital interfaces (app or portals) so that their customers can see their transactions and can benefit from digital banking services offered alongside. This means that cardholders might notice a fraudulent transaction on their card earlier than the bank’s fraud team manages to reach out to the cardholder or they are immediately aware of a problem with a transaction.

Reach out to the bank

As soon as the cardholder notices a problem with a transaction, they try to reach out to the bank to report it. From a cardholder’s point of view, after reporting the problem, the process should be done. However, normally, it takes more than just a simple call or e-mail to the customer service. For example, for a fraud case, the process involves talking to the call center, then talking to someone from the fraud department to answer a few questions, then receiving a letter from the bank to confirm that the reported transaction was fraudulent and sending it back to the bank. For a dispute with a merchant (e.g., service/product not delivered), the process involves filling out a long complex form and sending it together with information on the purchases, previous communication with the merchant, etc, to the bank. Due to process lead times and the response periods for merchants, customers then have to wait for several weeks until they get feedback from the bank.

The chargeback process at the bank

The chargeback process at the bank starts by reimbursing the cardholder on a provisional basis, filing a chargeback towards the merchants’ bank, and in case of fraud, issuing a new card for the cardholder. There might be some back and forth communications (often letters) between the bank and the cardholder for additional information or confirmation. Depending on the work backlog of the bank, this process can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or months.

The problem with today’s process

Nowadays customers have much higher expectations regarding the response time on their requests. We are living in an era of on-demand services, quick responses, and real-time status updates. However, when it comes to the chargeback process, which has been established in the first place to benefit cardholders, the experience is far from quick and pleasant; on the contrary, it can lead to frustration and negative emotions for cardholders. As this happens in the context of an already stressful event, the bank should aim at reducing friction and cumbersome administrative hurdles.

Turning chargebacks into a cardholder self-service with a pleasant user experience

Leveraging digital channels for cardholder self-servicing

In the same way, as the cardholder sees a problematic transaction in their banking app or portal, they could also report it to the bank. However, this does not mean merely offer a digital version of the existing chargeback form to the cardholder to fill out. Instead, the cardholders should be guided in an easy way and in the language that they understand. Through such a conversation the required information and the cardholder’s statement regarding the transaction can be collected and automatically verified. In case of a legitimate claim, a digital fraud or chargeback case can be created and displayed to the chargeback analyst at the bank to start working on it. This means an end-to-end digitalization of the process from the cardholder to the chargeback analyst; thereby eliminating administrative hurdles such as letters, calls, or emails and reducing friction

Such a conversation can be designed in a way to improve the cardholder experience but also to avoid unjustified disputes. As a result, the information collected from the conversation can help to avoid unnecessary follow-up communications with the cardholder. Resulting in a win-win situation for both the cardholder and the bank.

Keeping cardholder updated throughout the process

As mentioned above, the current process may take up to a few months, especially in case of a dispute with a merchant. This usually results in follow up calls from the cardholder to inquiry about the status of their dispute, which means an additional workload for call centers. When the process is fully digitalized end-to-end, any update on the dispute can be automatically communicated to the cardholder in the app or portal to avoid unnecessary calls. In the same way, the digital channel can be used to collect additional information from the cardholder, if needed throughout the chargeback process.

Implementing and using such a bidirectional conversation channel is a fundamentally different approach than the commonly seen concept of turning an existing chargeback form into an online form.

Acting even more proactively and avoiding fraudulent transactions

While chargebacks are not limited to fraud chargebacks, statistically, the majority of chargebacks are driven by fraudulent transactions. With the advancement of fraud detection systems, most fraudulent transactions are detected by the bank automatically and then the cardholder is contacted by the fraud team by telephone or letter. Reaching out to cardholders is usually not easy or quick. With a digital channel in place, the cardholder can be contacted via a push notification to the banking app to confirm if a transaction is fraudulent or not. In the case of confirmed fraud, the chargeback and recovery process can be started even without initiation from the cardholder side.

Besides an improved customer experience, this quick feedback process helps banks to train or adjust their fraud prevention models on more accurate data and prevent similar fraud patterns on other cards.

The future of chargeback

The future of chargebacks can be far better than what it is today. While the actual chargeback processes offered by banks today are cumbersome, frustrating, and inefficient, there is a great opportunity to turn it into a pleasant customer experience that will increase customer loyalty and strengthen the value proposition of card payments.

Helping the cardholder or even positively surprising the cardholder in the context of an effortful and stressful event, will be remembered and valued.

If you want to leverage the hidden potential of chargebacks and turn them into a USP for your payment cards, check our website and get in touch.

In the next article of this series, we will explore how digitalization of the chargeback process can improve productivity in the back office process in terms of efficiency and speed of handling the increasing volume of chargeback.

If you like our article and want to read more, follow us on LinkedIn and Medium.

How to Delight Your Cardholders When it Counts the Most? The Case of Fraud and Dispute Chargebacks was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Social Part

Rivero was founded only a short while ago by the three founders: Thomas Weber, Fatemeh Nikayin and Thomas Müller. Paul Koutinas and I (Dominic Egger) joined this week for prototyping and backend respectively. You can find us all here.

The idea of the company, in short, is to build a modular platform for the payment industry that allows financial institutions to work more directly with payment schemes (think Mastercard, etc.). Our different SaaS products will help banks to become more efficient, more compliant and to provide compelling services to their customers.

Currently, banks have to deal with rigid and slow processes involving way too many parties. Therefore, we certainly fall under the very broad umbrella term of Fintech.

The social outlook of Rivero deserves special mention, I think, as it is fairly uncommon for Switzerland. Sadly, salary transparency in Switzerland is generally very poor and it is also not something openly talked about to the detriment of employees.

Luckily, the founders decided to work with an open book policy from the start, which means that everyone can see everyone else’s salary as well as any other company-related data.

This means that there is actually equal pay for people and no shady salary negotiations. There is an open and transparent system that decides in what salary-category people get put. The current salary range is 75–100k CHF. Over time salaries will be adjusted across all categories. For instance, I make 90k CHF a year which is slightly below the Zürich market rate. However, that is a given in a startup and to compensate for it, I get Stock Options and a cool place to work at! Besides, there is also an extra week of paid leave for socially valuable work (e.g., teaching or animal/environmental welfare-work), an above minimum pension plan as well as actual paternity leave (which is not given by law in Switzerland, sadly).

We also would love to set up full remote work positions once we are more established and through the first start-up grind.

The Tech Part

To explain the technical side of how we work, I will go through how we are starting to do things on the backend as that is where I spend my time.

Currently, we are doing the initial phase of hiring and we strongly believe that the tech stack should be decided by not only external factors like availability of developers and “what everybody else does” but also by what we collaboratively believe makes good software.

We also think that the backend correctness should be very important, so should be composability and sustainability. Since we want to encourage our engineers to keep on learning and getting better, we have very little qualms about employing powerful but more complicated tools here.

That is why I pushed hard for strictly pure functional programming for the backend. Right now, our very moderately sized codebase is in Scala using the Typelevel and ZIO.

At the time of writing this blog post, the codebase is only a couple hundred lines. After all, only started a few days ago, but here are dependencies for one of the modules.

“org.typelevel” %% “cats-core” % catsVersion,
“io.circe” %% “circe-core” % circeVersion,
“io.circe” %% “circe-generic” % circeVersion,
“io.circe” %% “circe-parser” % circeVersion,
“io.circe” %% “circe-refined” % circeVersion,
“dev.zio” %% “zio” % zioVersion,
“dev.zio” %% “zio-interop-cats” % zioCatsInteropVersion,
“org.http4s” %% “http4s-dsl” % http4sVersion,
“org.http4s” %% “http4s-blaze-client” % http4sVersion,
“org.http4s” %% “http4s-circe” % http4sVersion,
“eu.timepit” %% “refined” % refinedVersion,
“eu.timepit” %% “refined-cats” % refinedVersion,

Personally, I would love to introduce Haskell at some point. We are developing a service based architecture and do not see why we should stay with one language if a task comes up that can be done much better in another. I would also love to explore formal specifications and proofs with technologies like TLA+, since we will be handling financial and private data. Lastly, I would love to use Dhall because I hope I never see another YAML file in my life.

I believe that all of these technologies and more in their vein align very well with our tents of correctness, composability and sustainability.

Getting in Touch

But enough about my little corner in the backend! Other than someone to help me out in the backend, we are also looking for a Frontend and a DevOps Engineer to join us.

Since both of those are not my speciality, I have much less to write about. However, I hope this post gives you a bit of an insight into how we operate, what we believe in and with what kind of technologies we want to work with.

If this interests you can head over to our website and check out the jobs section. If you have any more questions feel free to drop us an email (work [at] rivero [dot] tech) or ping me directly!

Please keep in mind that currently, we are looking for people from EU/EFTA countries to join us on-site in Zürich, Switzerland. However, we did set up an email (remotework [at] rivero [dot] tech) where you can send us your CV so that we have a list of people to contact as soon as we have remote work set up.

Working at Rivero was originally published in Rivero AG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.