Retail Dispute Management Firm Chargeback Raises $6.6M

Retail dispute management system Chargeback announced Monday (June 8) that it has closed a $6.6 million Series A1 funding round.

Chargeback said the money will accelerate its growth and ability to help online and offline retailers decrease credit card disputes, achieve higher win rates and retain more revenue. The company added that the COVID-19 pandemic has made chargebacks a more urgent concern as eCommerce transactions have spiked.

CEO John Munro told PYMNTS that Chargeback will use the money partly to continue automating the company’s business process across different payments platforms. He said the firm’s dispute management system is basically deployed across all major credit card and alternative payment ecosystems, but that navigating network rules remains a complex task for retailers who face growing chargeback issues.

“Automation will help us take all the rules and data from four or five disparate systems and aggregate them into one response document,” Munro said. “When retailers see chargeback fraud or when they want to contest that chargeback, we need to integrate into all relevant platforms. That’s the best way for us to support merchants as we grow and as eCommerce grows.”

Dispute management has historically been a drain on both personnel and the customer experience. However, Chargeback offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based solution that integrates and automates the dispute lifecycle.

Munro said the problem has been most prevalent online, where transactions are disputed 12 times more often than they are with in-store purchases. The spike in eCommerce that has accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic has only increased chargeback issues.

Munro said the new funds will also help Chargeback increase its data insight capabilities. For example, the company’s predictive analytics solution helps retailers see the relative levels of success they can expect with different types of chargebacks. Stores can also predict how they can affect acceptance rates, win-backs, customer satisfaction and overall revenue.

FINTOP Capital and Next Frontier Capital led the new funding round, with participation from existing investors like Next Coast Ventures and the Kickstart Fund.

“We are thrilled to add rapidly growing Chargeback to our FinTech portfolio,” FINTOP partner John Philpott said. “In a space that is historically labor-intensive and slow to adopt technology, the Chargeback SaaS platform has made [the company] a clear leader in the dispute-management space. The way Chargeback couples automation, data aggregation and deep insights helps merchants easily and quickly scale, optimize revenue and provide a better customer experience.”