Episode Six and Decisionly Partner to Modernize Issuer-Side Dispute Management

Episode Six, a global technology provider of enterprise-grade card issuing, and Decisionly, an AI-powered dispute automation platform, announced last week a strategic partnership to bring an issuer-side solution to market covering card infrastructure and payment dispute management. 

The Underserved Issuer-Side of the Market 

“Disputes have come up consistently in conversations with our clients for some time,” said John Mitchell, CEO and co-founder of Episode Six. “It’s not that issuers haven’t had tools for this, it’s that most of those tools were built for an earlier era of card programs. Partnering with Decisionly felt like the right response to something our clients were already telling us they needed.”

Other companies in the category of issuer-side dispute management solutions include Quavo and Casap. The space has received less attention than merchant-side dispute management solutions, for which at least a half-dozen significant solution providers exist. This includes PayPal’s in-house solution, Chargehound, where Decisionly’s CEO and CTO both worked for over seven years before and after its acquisition by PayPal.

“Dispute management solutions are not new to the market,” said Decisionly CEO and co-founder Pallavi Kuppa-Apte. “We see a range of approaches being adopted, from fully manual operations where investigators handle every stage of the lifecycle, to teams that cobble together manual and technology workflows using external case management tools, paying both for the software and the headcount needed to run it.”

She added, “These approaches can serve a purpose for a while. But when card programs hit an inflection point of growth, they break down quickly on performance, scalability, cost, and compliance. [Decisionly is] purpose-built for fast-growing card programs, with a focus on delivering outcomes, not just software.”

Can Issuer-Side Full Automation Be Trusted? 

It’s an open question regarding whether issuers are ready to trust full-scale automation of their dispute operations, given the regulatory and compliance implications of getting cases wrong.

Decisionly’s Kuppa-Apte acknowledges this, while still advocating AI-based automation as the superior approach.

“Disputes do sit at a sensitive intersection,” Kuppa-Apte wrote in an email to Fraudbeat. “A false positive erodes cardholder trust, a regulatory misstep creates compliance exposure, and both have real business consequences. Getting automation right in this context means more than just speed.”

She added,”We provide automation while giving control, flexibility and visibility back to issuers. Clients define their workflow rules based on their own standard operating procedures and requirements, and Decisionly’s AI operates strictly within those parameters. Every decision and action taken by Decisionly is visible and auditable in real-time. The automation is powerful, but the control stays with the issuer.

“Done right, automation actually strengthens compliance rather than threatening it. One of the most costly consequences of manual and legacy dispute processes is missed regulatory and network deadlines, and the write-offs that follow. With Decisionly, those deadlines are built directly into the product, and with over 95% of cases automated and actioned instantly, missed deadlines are eliminated.”

Different Sides, Different Incentives 

Kuppa-Apte pointed to Decisionly’s founding team’s experience at Chargehound with providing the company with a deep understanding of the payment dispute ecosystem’s complexities. However, they also learned from that experience that incentives between the merchant and issuer sides of the equation differ significantly, as the regulatory and compliance burden sits almost entirely with the issuer. According to Kuppa-Apte, this is exactly where technology investment had been most lacking. 

“On the merchant side, the goal is to win disputes and recover revenue,” Kuppa-Apte told Fraudbeat in an email. “ On the issuer side, the obligation is to investigate, assess eligibility, and resolve them under consumer protection rules and a complex web of network rules, regardless of the outcome…That means delivering a fair, fast resolution while maintaining operational efficiency, which is a very different incentive structure.” 

Addressing the Dispute Tech Gap

This Episode Six and Decisionly partnership is about more than just two companies teaming up. It’s putting the focus on a structural gap finally getting attention: issuer-side dispute management has lagged merchant-side solutions for years, even though issuers carry the heavier regulatory burden. Whether the market accepts high-automation approaches like Decisionly’s will likely hinge on trust: issuers need to see that auditability and rule-based guardrails can satisfy compliance teams the way manual review historically has. If it works, this could be the start of AI-based issuer-side solutions catching up to where merchant-side dispute tech already is.