r/payments

I’ve been dealing with a pretty frustrating issue lately and wanted to see how others are handling it.

chargebacks are starting to seriously affect my margins, especially as volume grows. it’s not even always about clear fraud. a lot of it ends up being friendly fraud, misunderstandings, or customers bypassing support and going straight to their bank.

what’s been difficult is how unpredictable it all feels. some weeks are totally fine, and then out of nowhere there’s a spike in disputes that don’t really make sense. it ends up pulling time away from actually running and growing the business because you’re constantly reacting instead of building.

right now I’m still handling everything pretty manually. checking notifications, pulling together proof, responding within deadlines, and trying to keep track of what’s been submitted where. it works, but it doesn’t really feel sustainable once volume starts to scale.

feels like one of those problems that quietly becomes a big cost center over time, so would be interested to hear what’s actually working for people right now.

I've spent the last several years building payment platforms and leading engineering teams focused on:
• Global payment method integrations (cards, wallets, APMs)
• Subscription billing and recurring payments
• Merchant payouts and multi-currency settlements
• Chargeback and dispute automation
• Fraud and risk systems
• Tax and compliance workflows
• High-volume payment processing
A recurring pattern: most merchants don't have a chargeback problem—they have a visibility, workflow, and prevention problem.
Teams lose significant time:
Gathering dispute evidence

Managing fraud and processor alerts

Tracking recurring billing issues

Analyzing dispute trends

Coordinating across support, payments, and risk

Many existing tools are fragmented, costly, or built for large enterprises.
I'm exploring a SaaS product focused on payment operations and dispute management, and would love feedback from merchants, payment professionals, and founders.
Questions:
What's your biggest payments operations pain point?

For recurring payments, what drives the most disputes?

Have you built internal tools because existing solutions fell short?

Would you pay for better dispute and payment operations visibility and automation?

I'm also interested in connecting with someone who has deep payments experience and has:
Built a payments product

Worked at a processor, acquirer, gateway, or PSP

Led payments, risk, or fraud operations

Built and scaled a B2B SaaS company

I bring strong technical leadership and hands-on experience building large-scale payment systems. Looking for feedback first, but open to exploring a partnership if there's strong alignment.
DMs are open.

Hi everyone,
I’m 36 years old and I’ve recently become very interested in the payments industry, especially high-risk PSPs, acquiring, merchant onboarding, risk management, fraud prevention, and payment infrastructure.
I’ve been reading articles, following industry news, studying companies in the space, and trying to understand how the ecosystem works. The more I learn, the more I realize how much there is to know.
If you were starting from zero today and wanted to build a successful career in payments, what would you focus on first?
What skills are the most valuable?
What mistakes should beginners avoid?
Which resources helped you the most?
What entry-level roles would you recommend?
How can someone without direct experience break into the industry?
I’d appreciate any advice from people working in PSPs, acquiring banks, fintech, fraud, compliance, or merchant services.
Thank you for your time.

Not sure if anyone else has dealt with this but once a few customers realized they could file chargebacks and keep the product, it kind of snowballed, now its turned into a mess where every refund request feels suspicious and half the time we are the ones eating the loss while the item is already gone.

we tried tightening support, adding more checks, and making the process slower, but it just made legit customers annoyed and the bad ones moved louder, feels like once people figure out the system, they start testing how far they can push it.

curious how other people are handling this without turning the whole store into a wall..

Early on, payment-related work often seems to get absorbed into finance, ops, support, or whoever happens to be available.

Then at some point it becomes a real function:

• reconciliation
• payment investigations
• exception handling
• settlement monitoring
• customer payment queries

For companies that scaled successfully, when did you realise payment operations needed dedicated ownership?