What is the Visa Claims Resolution?

Please note: This is an updated version of the previous communication we published in September 2017.

In April 2018 the Visa Claims Resolution, Visa’s new dispute resolution programme, will go live for all our merchants receiving Visa chargebacks.

VCR went live in Hong Kong and New Zealand in October 2017 for domestic disputes.

From April 14, 2018, VCR will apply to all incoming Visa disputes for all regions.

In 2017, Visa introduced a new dispute programme to simplify dispute resolution and improve the process for handling chargebacks.

The Visa Claims Resolution is designed to resolve chargebacks faster on Visa’s side, which will prevent invalid disputes from entering the system.

VCR is already live in Hong Kong and New Zealand as of October 2017.

Incoming domestic disputes in these countries and disputes between the two countries are processed under the VCR dispute flow.

Remaining countries will migrate from April 14, 2018. All incoming disputes on this date will be processed with VCR.

We have made the necessary changes to our Visa dispute resolution flow to support VCR.

With the introduction of VCR, dispute resolution rules will be modified in the following ways:

1. The existing reason codes will be grouped into four categories:

2. Disputes will be routed in two different workflows, called Allocation and Collaboration:

3.  Dispute response timeframe will be reduced to 30 days (currently 45 days). In the Customer Area the defense time frame is 18 days. 

4. As of April 14, 2018, Visa will block chargebacks with a fraudulent reason code (VCR reason code 10.4) for online transactions if the issuing bank approved the transaction with a Card Verification Value 2 (CVV2) mismatch. Visa encourages merchants to use CVV2 as part of their fraud prevention setup.

5. Visa will allow a maximum of 35 fraudulent chargebacks on the same account number, within a timeframe of 120 days for Card Not Present (online) transactions.

6. Reason code 75: 'Cardholder does not recognize transaction' can no longer be used. Visa requires issuers to use the existing data in the Visa portal to assist the cardholder to recognize the transaction. Other options are to exercise a Request for Information (RFI)

Familiarize yourself with the procedural changes and make any required technical changes to comply with the new regulations by April 13, 2018 (see the FAQ for more information on the applicable technical changes).