Independent research and standards
To advance fairer, faster, and more transparent payment dispute resolution.
Independent research. Shared understanding. Better outcomes.
Every side of the dispute.
Better payment dispute outcomes don't come from rules alone - they come from people who design, operate and live within the system understanding each other. The Payment Disputes Institute brings rigorous, independent research to that challenge, creating a common ground between issuers, merchants and consumers so the whole ecosystem can move forward together.
Independence
Our research, policy positions, and dispute frameworks are developed free from commercial direction — by any industry partner, funder, or stakeholder.
Fairness
Unclear rules create assumptions and best guesses where every participant deserves predictable outcomes — PDI opens participant-agnostic conversations to develop transparent frameworks that make dispute processing more equitable for all.
Clarity
The payments dispute ecosystem suffers from ambiguity at every level — PDI's work turns complex, contested territory into clear frameworks and defined positions that participants can actually rely on.
Latest Research
Recent publications
May 2026
Liability in Agentic Commerce: Who Pays When the Agent Gets It Wrong?
The payments industry has spent a decade building the foundations agentic commerce now depends on — 3D Secure, network tokenisation, passkeys, digital wallet authentication. Those foundations are being puzzled together to enable a model they were not designed for, and they will be pushed to the edges of their functionality in the process.
Read research →May 2026
The Evidence Problem: Why Dispute Evidence Is Both Overloaded and Undervalued
Every payment dispute, in theory, turns on evidence. A cardholder says the goods were damaged. A merchant says they were delivered in perfect condition. Somewhere between those two claims sits what actually happened — and evidence is supposed to be the mechanism that gets us there. Supposedly!
Read research →April 2026
Commerce moved on. The rules didn't.
Payment dispute frameworks were built for a simpler world. Decades of change in how people buy, sell, and pay have left those frameworks struggling to keep up — and every participant in the ecosystem is absorbing the consequences.
Read research →