8 Sep, 2025
Regulation E sets the rules for how banks must handle disputed transactions, but compliance is just the floor, not the ceiling. A family left without access to their paycheck, or a retiree whose account was drained overnight, needs more than a regulatory timeline. They need a process that moves quickly, keeps them informed, and works toward getting their money back.
Dispute management is about more than rules; it’s about managing trust with your account holders when they’re most vulnerable. And in an increasingly competitive environment, responding rapidly and with empathy could be what keeps their trust in your institution intact.
At CONNECT25, Q2’s Emily McDougall and Linsday Beyer of Fox Communities Credit Union shared tips on how to turn dispute management from a chore into an opportunity for strengthening account holder relationships.
The dispute management problem is getting bigger
Driven by friendly fraud, skimming, and data breaches, the volume of disputed transactions is expected to reach nearly $50B by 2030—an increase of about 29% in just six years.
Source: ChargeBacks911
With the rise in disputes, community financial institutions (FIs), in particular, have struggled to keep up. Many rely on manual processes, old-school spreadsheets, and ever-growing stacks of paper. While the intent is to take care of the account holders, the result is often frustration for all involved.
Let’s look closer at what makes dispute management challenging for FI staff, particularly at community and regional institutions:
• Limited technology, compared to larger FIs with bigger IT budgets or in-house solutions, often means an overdependence on highly manual processes.
• Manual processes are slow, time-intensive, and sometimes ineffective, which creates operational burden and a slow account holder dispute experience.
• Employee turnover requires constant training on dispute management practices.
The solution is a technology system that allows account holders to trigger disputes in digital banking, connected to a staff-facing back-end that helps manage the operations behind disputes. It gives FIs much-needed scale while improving the account holder experience. There are many such tools that give FIs much-needed scale while improving the account holder experience.
Here’s how Fox Communities Credit Union is using that technology to tackle their dispute management challenges.
How Fox Communities Credit Union streamlined dispute management
Based in Appleton, Wisconsin, Fox Communities Credit Union serves more than 134,000 member-owners and nearly 8,000 business members. For many years, the Fox team had been handling disputed transactions manually.
Lindsay Beyer, VP of Digital Services for the credit union, described a “swivel chair” effect in which employees were jumping from one system to the next in an effort to investigate a single disputed transaction.
The process was inefficient, chaotic, and ultimately not effective enough to deliver members the service they deserved.
In 2021, Fox worked with Q2 to deploy the Centrix Dispute Tracking System (CentrixDTS). Now, instead of submitting disputes across an array of legacy channels, members can self-serve by creating a dispute through online banking. And disputed transactions are handled by credit union staff via automated, rather than manual, processes.
“It’s been really good," Beyer said. "We got rid of a lot of manual processes and a lot of phone calls coming into our contact center because members can self-serve through online banking,”
Andi enters the picture
Since their initial launch of CentrixDTS, Fox has added the AI-powered Andi® Copilot to help them make better, faster dispute decisions. Andi empowers the Fox team to act quickly on disputes by delivering insights and data the moment they’re needed contextually within the staff-facing CentrixDTS user interface. Specifically, Andi:
• Keeps cases on track: Alerts staff to overdue disputes, pending signatures, and upcoming provisional credit or resolution deadlines so nothing falls through the cracks.
• Surfaces meaningful insights: Enriches transaction details with merchant/location data and highlights unusual activity, such as repeat disputes, high-dollar amounts, or sudden spikes tied to specific customers, merchants, or locations.
• Reduces errors and inefficiencies: Flags missing documentation, warns on uncommon dispute reasons, and provides quick tools like interest calculations, all customizable to the Fox’s policies and compliance requirements.
Andi also helps Fox bankers get deeper, richer data about a transaction without having to dig through multiple systems. Through its integration with Plaid, Andi can deliver information such as merchant, address, purchase type, recurrence, member spending behavior to provide valuable context that the team can use to quickly make the right decisions.
Ultimately, many transaction disputes come down to a simple question: “Should we issue this member a refund?” Fox and Q2 are currently working to implement Dispute Investigator, which looks at data like geolocation, merchant history, dispute frequency, and user transaction behavior to recommend whether a dispute claim should be accepted or denied.
What’s next?
Just as the fraud landscape continues to evolve, Fox and Q2 continue to look for ways to handle disputes—and serve members—better. Ongoing and future enhancements to the credit union’s CentrixDTS solution include:
• Card Cancellation: Integration with card processors to automatically cancel compromised cards as soon as a related dispute is confirmed, helping reduce further unauthorized activity and ensuring prompt reissuance to members.
• Dispute Reminders: Automated alerts to keep staff on top of unresolved cases, critical deadlines, and required next steps, helping maintain compliance with Reg E timelines and avoid missed resolution or provisional credit dates.
• Email Letters: The ability to generate and send dispute correspondence electronically, reducing paper use, speeding communication, and creating a secure, trackable record of notifications sent to members.
In addition, Fox is looking into ways to leverage the Q2 Dispute Network to tap into trends and insights from across Q2’s more than 500 DTS customers.
The final word
Fraud is evolving fast, and FIs have a responsibility to treat customers and members with empathy, respect, and urgency. Effective dispute resolution is so much more than a compliance checkbox—it’s a way to strengthen your brand and elevate the account holder experience. With tools like CentrixDTS, FIs can be better equipped than ever to deliver resolution with speed, clarity, and confidence.