With the growing number of incoming disputes, traditional techniques of using excel have become time consuming and burdensome. Tracking your disputes electronically is not only cost effective but easy to setup. An added bonus is improved customer experience with accurate letters and notifications.

Regulation E Dispute tracking is becoming a bigger challenge to manage with rise in debit card adoption for payments. There are a number of reasons for this but we won’t get into those in this article. Further, the growing number of online purchases make it difficult for merchants to verify identity. Chip cards have helped reduce the fraud in stores, however, the technology does not provide the same security features for online purchases. With more purchases shifting to online stores, banks can expect to see a rising number of fraudulent transactions, especially during the holidays.

To make the management of Reg E Disputes easier, banks are automating their dispute tracking process. An overview of the steps needed to deploy an effective system are as follows:

Step 1: Replace paper based submissions with electronic submissions.
Step 2: Automate the customer notifications and letter generation.
Step 3: Monitor the deadlines.
Step 4: Analyze the losses.
Step 5: Refine the process for bank process compliance.
Step 6: Integration with Core System (Optional)

Step 1 removes the error prone and time consuming paper based process with an electronic dispute submission template that ensures all the information is submitted correctly the first time. The main advantage gained is the reduction of errors and time consuming follow-ups to gather missing data.

Step 2 enables the back office to manage a large number of disputes quickly and efficiently. Letter generation is by far the most time consuming process for the back office. This process is cumbersome when not all transactions are eligible for provisional credit. Using an Excel spreadsheet requires calculating and tracking each transaction separately. So the process of generating a letter can end up taking a significant amount of time.

Automating the letter generation must allow the back office to select only eligible transactions within a customer submission and notate why certain transactions are not eligible.  Once the transaction eligibility process has been completed, the back office staff can effectively create the provisional credit notice letter with a single click.

With the proper system in place, step 3 should happen automatically within the dispute tracking system. Dates are captured at the time the customer submits a dispute and deadlines must trigger alerts. A deadline alert is the most basic type of alert. A more sophisticated alerting system will provide time based alerts that keep the back office informed as the deadline approaches and has passed.

Step 4 helps provide a context for bank losses. Understanding the context for each bank loss, including customer information, merchant information and other data points, allow banks to better manage their policies and adjust customer credit lines to manage and minimize future losses.

Step 5 can be accomplished by understanding the results in Step 4 and incorporating bank processes into the tracking system so as to minimize losses.  Through quarterly reviews the alerting system can be customized to alert the back office when bank deadlines and procedural events need to happen.

Step 6 is optional and a big step in reducing manual work around dispute tracking. Posting provisional credits to the general ledger and reversing them can be time consuming and an integration with the core system is a big time saver. However, in addition to posting entries to the general ledger, various other integrations need to be considered to properly track all the losses related to Regulation E Disputes.

About FINBOA™

FINBOA™ is headquartered out of Houston Texas. FINBOA™ helps community banks automate their compliance and regulatory needs.  FINBOA™ delivers cloud based solutions that is accessible to both office and mobile users.  By building a solution that conforms to both the desktop and mobile devices, FINBOA™ creates significant value for banks through the single platform solution. FINBOA™ is backed by Financial Software Solutions and FSSI, an angel investment company.

About Dheeraj “Raj” Singal

Raj has been writing and managing financial service software applications for banks and money lenders for over 20 years. He as a bachelors and masters in computer science in addition to an MBA. Raj is an expert in creating secure SAAS solutions for financial institutions. Raj works directly with customers to ensure solutions meet their requirements, and uses a “minimum number of clicks” to create and enhance the user experience in his applications.

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