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Chargebacks have long been one of the most troubling problems facing merchants, acquirers, card associations, and issuers. Research has shown that most chargebacks initiated by consumers are the result of simple misunderstandings and poor memory. Incurrent, a provider of advanced business automation software to the payment card industry, recently announced the first tool specifically designed to assist merchants and issuers in resolving disputes before they become costly chargebacks: InMerchant.

InMerchant is the industry’s first comprehensive online database of card-accepting merchant dispute resolution information. InMerchant provides credit-card issuers with call center tools that are used to access valuable merchant information when a consumer calls with a complaint. This information includes the store location, corporate and retail DBA names, a description of the business and what it sells, customer service telephone numbers, email addresses, and website URLs. Using a proprietary algorithm, InMerchant links these profile records to the billing description a particular merchant presents onto a cardmember’s monthly statement.

In pilot now with major card issuers and acquirers, InMerchant has proven effective at preventing chargebacks by helping consumers to remember legitimate purchases, recognize stores with which they have done business, and contact stores themselves when a simple answer to a question may prevent a chargeback from occuring. InMerchant benefits retailers by reducing chargebacks and making them once again an integral partner in handling inquiries from their customers. The system benefits issuers by enabling them to resolve more dispute calls at the first point of contact from the cardmember.

Keeping the database comprehensive and up-to-date is the key to InMerchant’s effectiveness. Incurrent employs a dedicated research staff, and a number of proprietary business processes, to achieve this goal. “We have three merchant populations that we work with,” says Mark Betz, Incurrent’s chief technology officer. “First, we track and research the top 1000+ merchants by transaction volume; second, we receive regular updates from issuers on the merchants that are causing the most frequent chargebacks, and we invest in researching these; lastly, we work with acquirers and ISOs as channel partners, providing them with the ability to enroll their merchant clients to create and manage their own online profiles.” The combination of these methods has led to the database containing detailed information on more than 2800 card-accepting merchants, linked to more than 1 million individual billing descriptions.

InMerchant is available to card issuers in several versions, including web-based desktop tools, as well as XML-based APIs that make it easy to integrate the merchant data into other systems. Merchants may gain access to the system to establish and maintain their own profiles through their Acquirers or ISOs who have established InMerchant partnerships with Incurrent. The company’s long-term vision is to evolve InMerchant into a complete merchant-card issuer dispute resolution network. “We would like to see merchants in control of how they are presented, and how they are contacted when their customers have a question,” says Betz, “and we are confident that issuers will utilize this data in their call centers, and in their web-based billing systems, to mitigate more incoming disputes, causing less chargebacks and significant savings to everyone involved in the network.”

For more information contact Bill Kinnelly at 973-781-9012, extension 270, or bkinnelly@incurrent.com