The COVID-19 pandemic has completely disrupted usual business practices and consumer behaviors, leading to a tremendous increase in chargebacks—and if you’re a business owner, it’s likely you’ve experienced this firsthand. While the travel and hospitality industry has been hit particularly hard due to increased travel cancellations, it’s certainly not the only industry that’s experiencing an increase in chargebacks: other factors such as inventory issues, shipping delays, and a spike of ‘friendly-fraud’ chargebacks filed by cash-strapped customers have affected merchants everywhere.

In this article, we’ll dive into several key factors that are contributing to the chargeback explosion during COVID-19, and share some practical steps that merchants can take to reduce negative outcomes. Plus, we’ll discuss some unique and timely circumstances in which cardholders actually do not have the grounds to dispute transactions.

A cashless ATM, otherwise known as point-of-banking technology, is a payment terminal that enables customers to make purchases with a debit card in the same way as they would make an ATM transaction to withdraw cash. The system was originally created as an alternative payment solution to serve high-risk businesses—such as legal medical marijuana dispensaries and certain types of “blacklist” businesses—that typically accept cash as the primary form of payment. Now, a variety of other types of businesses use this method of payment acceptance as well, including lunch trucks and vendors at farmer’s markets, for example.

In part 3 of Fidelity’s Effective Chargeback Management Series, we’ll be focusing on the chargeback reason code “Credit Not Processed”

Whether you call it Faster Payments, Immediate Payments, Instant Payments, or Fast Money, real-time payments technology has gained a solid foothold in the payment processing world.

In Part 1, we gave an overview of what chargebacks are and how merchants can respond to chargebacks with the reason code, “Product or Service Not Received or Merchandise/Service Not Provided.” In the next several installments in our series, we will continue to cover some best practices for even more chargeback types. This week we’ll focus on “Cardholder Claimed Not to Participate” chargebacks.

Q&A With Fidelity’s Director of I.T., Aron Pollak

As a leading provider of payment processing solutions for many businesses in the tri-state area, Fidelity keeps a close watch on emerging security threats—and unfortunately, in recent months, ransomware has been attacking businesses at growing rates. In our community alone, over a dozen companies have been targeted by this malicious software that locks the victim out of their files until a ransom is paid. 

Ransomware attacks can be incredibly costly for businesses, and more often than not, businesses are left on their own to pick up the pieces (even government agencies like the FBI are unable to help). That’s why our Director of I.T., Aron Pollak, took it upon himself to volunteer his expertise—alongside a group of technicians within the I.T. community—to assist many of the victims whose businesses were brought to a complete shutdown by ransomware.

Aron sat down for a brief interview with Fidelity’s Security Manager, Zalman Miller, to share some insights into the nature of these attacks, as well as some advice on what organizations can do to protect themselves.

As contactless payments explode in popularity (purchases made with mobile wallets grew by 82% this past Black Friday as compared to 2018!), we’d like to provide you with a brief overview of how contactless payments work and what their unique advantages are.

We’re excited to announce the launch of a new series that will provide valuable information about chargebacks and how business owners can best manage them to mitigate negative outcomes. In Part 1, we’ll be giving an overview of chargebacks and focusing on one chargeback reason code in particular.