By Henry Black 4/16/26
A Disputes and Chargebacks Specialist with a 80% first-stage resolution rate shows how disciplined dispute handling can recover revenue and reduce avoidable losses
Digital payments have made commerce faster, but they have also made losses harder to spot. For many businesses, the obvious threat is fraud. The less obvious one is what happens after a transaction has already gone wrong: weak dispute handling, incomplete evidence, poor classification, and slow internal response. Consumers’ fraud losses rose sharply in 2023-2025; meanwhile, Mastercard expects global chargeback volume to rise 24% from 2026 to 2028.
Katsyarina Sabaleuskaya, an operational specialist with 12 years in banking processing and more than 2 years in chargebacks and fraud disputes, approaches this problem from the inside of the payments system. As a Leading specialist in Processing for a major financial institution in Belarus, she handles Visa and Mastercard client disputes and fraud-related cases. During the period of 2023-2025, she successfully handled a large volume of fraud-related disputed transactions and also helped improve internal coordination between the bank’s teams in cases involving unauthorized debits. She shares her experience and actionable insights with other professionals in her scientific and methodological works. She is the author of expert publications on dispute resolution and loss-minimization mechanisms for banks and acquirers. Among Katsyarina’ s foundational scientific works in this area were a methodological guide on transaction disputes from the issuing bank’s perspective and a separate article on the methodology for disputing non-refundable payments in international payment systems.
Katsyarina’s core message is not narrowly legal or strictly technical but operational. “Businesses do not lose money only when fraud occurs. They also lose money when the dispute process itself is weak. A valid case can fail because the incident was classified under the wrong code, the supporting documents were requested too late, no one preserved the merchant correspondence, or a team escalated the case without re-evaluating the evidence,” she explains. She saw the same issue from another angle when she served as a judge at AITEX Summit Winter 2026: From Insight to Action, where she evaluated projects from the perspective of payment systems analytics, fraud detection, and dispute resolution.
In her Methodological Guide to Transaction Disputes in Visa and Mastercard Systems: Issuing Bank Practice (2023–2025), published in the Universal Library of Multidisciplinary, she systematizes the chargeback lifecycle, improves evidentiary analysis, and reduces losses caused by misclassification, missed deadlines, or failure to apply liability-shift mechanisms. Katsyarina treats dispute handling not as a clerical follow-up but as a structured system that begins with qualification and continues through evidence, timing, and escalation logic.
Katsyarina’s methodology rests on four principles:
- Classify the problem correctly from the start.
In payments, similar-looking complaints often belong to very different dispute categories. A non-delivered item, a canceled recurring payment, a missing credit, a point-of-interaction error, and a fraud claim all follow different rules. Sabaleuskaya’s point is that the wrong dispute code can ruin an otherwise valid case by making the chargeback technically invalid and blocking further recovery. For merchants and platforms, that means speed alone is not enough: the business first has to identify what actually happened. - Evidence matters more than argument.
Many companies still think a dispute is won by writing a convincing explanation at the end. Her methodology suggests the opposite. The outcome usually depends on how the case file is built from the beginning. Different scenarios require different document sets, whether the case involves travel bookings, car rentals, online goods, or non-refundable subscriptions. Merchant correspondence, cancellation proof, tracking data, refund promises, delivery records, account history, and visual proof can all determine whether a complaint becomes a defensible case. - Early communication is part of risk control.
Katsyarina treats contact with the merchant as a practical stage of dispute management. Ideally, the customer should first attempt to resolve the issue directly, and they should confirm that contact through screenshots or correspondence. She also describes the Good Faith Letter as a useful tool that can encourage a voluntary refund before the dispute escalates. The lesson for businesses is simple: the earlier a case is documented and clearly framed, the better the chance of resolving it quickly and at lower cost. - Pre-arbitration is where discipline matters most.
Many teams see escalation as proof that they are taking a case seriously. Katsyarina treats it differently: as a point where judgment becomes critical. At the pre-arbitration stage, the issuer must reassess the merchant’s response, review any new evidence, and decide whether the case is still strong enough to continue. Automatically escalating without properly analyzing new materials is, in her view, a common mistake. Her methodology shows that when evidence is requested correctly and legal documents are prepared carefully, more cases can be resolved earlier and unnecessary escalation can be reduced.
That emphasis on careful evaluation also explains why she was invited in 2025 to serve on the jury panel of the 2nd Annual International Glonary Awards for Young Innovators, where she reviewed submissions in categories including Young Innovator of the Year, FinTech Disruptor Award, Young Founder of the Year, and Science & Research Young Excellence Award.
“Even a case that looks non-refundable or unwinnable at first can change once you classify it correctly, analyze the rules, and build the evidence the right way,” she says.
That idea runs through Katsyarina’s broader written work as well, but in her more recent research it becomes even more concrete. In her April 2026 article for the peer-reviewed The American Journal of Management and Economics Innovations, Principles of Successful Pre-Arbitration Disputes in International Payment Systems (Visa and Mastercard), she focuses on the stage where many cases are either recovered or lost. There, she examines how Visa and Mastercard structure pre-arbitration differently and argues that successful outcomes depend on four things: prevention and clean data from the outset, procedural accuracy and time discipline, strong evidence management, and a sober assessment of whether escalation still makes economic sense. Her earlier article for Universum develops a related point from another angle: many cases that seem closed are often being evaluated too narrowly. She extends the same logic in the peer-reviewed journal Finansovye Rynki i Banki, in Assessing the Success Rate of Payment Disputes for the Most Common Reason Code: Goods/Services Not Received, where she shows how one of the most common chargeback categories is often mishandled when teams rely on a late rebuttal instead of earlier fraud prevention, clearer communication, and stronger documentation.
For founders, CFOs, operations executives, and payments teams, Katsyarina’s message is, “Don’t wait for a wave of fraud claims or customer complaints to expose weaknesses in your dispute process. If your business handles a high volume of digital transactions, that process should already be under scrutiny. The key questions are basic but consequential: Who makes the first call on what kind of incident occurred? What evidence is gathered at the outset? How quickly are merchant communications captured and stored? And do teams know when a case is worth pushing forward and when it is not?” Katsyarina lays out the concrete mechanics behind that message in her “Methodological and Practical Recommendations for Contesting Fraudulent Disputes Executed Using 3-D Secure Technology in the International Payment Systems VISA International and MasterCard Inc.” article published in TechBullion, a London-based financial technology news platform focused on fintech and innovation coverage.
From 2023 to Q1 2026, the disputes she handled returned about $300,000 to clients. By her calculation, 2025 alone accounted for roughly $130,000, which, in her account, marked the peak year of her recovery work at the bank.
Companies that treat disputes as back-office aftercare often continue losing money long after the payment itself is complete.
That is where the business value of Katsyarina Sabaleuskaya’s work becomes clear. She does not frame dispute resolution as a technical corner of banking. She treats it as a system for protecting recoverable revenue. At a time when fraud losses remain high and chargeback pressure continues to grow, that shift in perspective matters. Companies focused on protecting margin can no longer view disputes as the final stage of a transaction. In many cases, they are the point at which real revenue protection begins.
