Independent research and standards
To advance fairer, faster, and more transparent payment dispute resolution.
Independent research. Shared understanding. Better outcomes.
Every side of the dispute.
Better payment dispute outcomes don't come from rules alone - they come from people who design, operate and live within the system understanding each other. The Payment Disputes Institute brings rigorous, independent research to that challenge, creating a common ground between issuers, merchants and consumers so the whole ecosystem can move forward together.
Independence
Our research, policy positions, and dispute frameworks are developed free from commercial direction — by any industry partner, funder, or stakeholder.
Fairness
Unclear rules create assumptions and best guesses where every participant deserves predictable outcomes — PDI opens participant-agnostic conversations to develop transparent frameworks that make dispute processing more equitable for all.
Clarity
The payments dispute ecosystem suffers from ambiguity at every level — PDI's work turns complex, contested territory into clear frameworks and defined positions that participants can actually rely on.
Latest Research
Recent publications
June 2026
Chargebacks Are in Scope of the Scam Prevention Framework — at least for now
Treasury's draft codes and rules put more meat on the bones of the Scams Prevention Framework. The development the payments industry should be watching, though, is not in the headline obligations. Previously ‘goods & services” disputes were clearly marked as out-of-scope, the current expectations lean on legitimacy testing.
Read research →May 2026
Liability in Agentic Commerce: Who Pays When the Agent Gets It Wrong?
The payments industry has spent a decade building the foundations agentic commerce now depends on — 3D Secure, network tokenisation, passkeys, digital wallet authentication. Those foundations are being puzzled together to enable a model they were not designed for, and they will be pushed to the edges of their functionality in the process.
Read research →May 2026
The Evidence Problem: Why Dispute Evidence Is Both Overloaded and Undervalued
Every payment dispute, in theory, turns on evidence. A cardholder says the goods were damaged. A merchant says they were delivered in perfect condition. Somewhere between those two claims sits what actually happened — and evidence is supposed to be the mechanism that gets us there. Supposedly!
Read research →