ACI Offers Dispute Management System
New York, N.Y. – 13 November 2007) – ACI Worldwide (Nasdaq: ACIW), a leading international provider of solutions for enterprise electronic payment systems, today announced the ACI Dispute Management System™.
The software is a powerful rules-based solution that automates the resolution of cardholder disputes and processing of chargebacks to help control processing costs and enhance efficiency in back-office operations. The solution enables card issuing and transaction acquiring institutions to automate tasks associated with dispute processing, guiding staff through the tasks that require human intervention to increase productivity and reduce training time while controlling exposure to losses due to write-offs and un-timely dispute handling.
Disputes and chargeback processing continue to be a labor intensive and costly exercise for most institutions in the card services arena. Despite card association initiatives to streamline and simplify the process, it remains an area encumbered by multiple, disparate systems and low productivity, and is highly error-prone. The profitability of a card portfolio is impacted by write-offs due to human error and mismanagement, and customer focus is often lost in the process, resulting in customer attrition.
As an integrated solution, the ACI Dispute Management System offers the benefits of automated workflow, task automation and rules management tailored to meet the international card association operating regulations for disputed transaction resolution.
The solution provides visibility to disputes at any stage during the lifecycle and enables the identification of repetitive cardholder disputes, multiple transactions associated with a cardholder dispute, and multiple transactions associated with a specific dispute arising from a particular fraud attack.
The Dispute Management System is unique in the marketplace in its singular focus on case management. Exception and dispute processing are based on electronic folders that represent individual customer cases. Multiple disputed transactions and the associated processing can be combined in each case, providing queue management via parameterized processes.
The Dispute Management System enables customers to generate comprehensive audit trails, which is particularly important given the fact that payment disputes may be subject to governmental and internal audits. Financial adjustments are made automatically via integration with an organization’s internal general ledger system. Finally, the solution stores all due dates and required customer notifications to maintain a complete historical file on each case.
“Historically many of our customers have written off a large volume of disputed transactions as it has been unprofitable to pursue them,” said Jeff Hale, senior vice president Americas marketing and business development at ACI. “Existing dispute management systems often require duplication of expensive services and do not enable banks to build up customer and merchant cases for multiple transactions. In contrast, the Dispute Management System enables financial service providers to offer a better service to customers while realizing significant savings.
“In addition, industry migration to EMV in international markets and the associated liability shift has resulted in a surge of dispute and chargeback activity,” said Hale. “This trend, combined with confusion in understanding the new rules and application of EMV data in the transaction, is putting further pressure on those responsible for managing customer disputes. In this type of environment, our solution can help financial institutions successfully and profitably resolve customer disputes.”
An existing case study on PLUSCARD, a credit card processor based in Germany, can be found at www.aciworldwide.com/pluscard. PLUSCARD has realized an 85 percent reduction in dispute resolution procedural errors.
About ACI Worldwide
Every second of every day, ACI Worldwide solutions are at work processing electronic payments, managing risk, automating back office systems and providing application infrastructure services. ACI is a leading international provider of solutions for banking, retail and cross-industry systems. ACI serves more than 800 customers in 84 countries including many of the world's largest financial institutions, retailers and payment processors. Visit ACI Worldwide at www.aciworldwide.com.
Any statements in this press release regarding projected results are preliminary and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In addition, this press release may contain other forward-looking statements including statements regarding ACI Worldwide Incorporated, its subsidiaries or third parties’ expectations, predictions, views, opportunities, plans, strategies, beliefs, and statements of similar effect. The forward-looking statements in this press release are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially.
For a detailed discussion of these risk factors, parties that are relying on the forward-looking statements should review the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Company's Form 10-K filed on May 11, 2007, the Company’s Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2006 filed on June 29, 2007, the Company’s Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended March 31, 2007 filed on August 10, 2007 and the Company’s Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2007 filed on September 20, 2007.
