How one financial institution reduced dispute operations by 80% using Pega Smart Disputes and process orchestration across six countries. See how Rulesware did it.
1.5 Million Disputes, Rebuilt Without Replacing a Single System For one financial services provider managing 1.5 million disputes annually across six countries, the operation worked. It just required 400 people to keep it that way. With 3.6 million clients, 21,000 employees, and dispute operations touching every card type and channel, biannual Mastercard mandate changes required separate interpretation, implementation, and testing cycles every time they arrived. Issuer and acquirer workflows ran in parallel without sharing context, and every process change pulled IT capacity away from everything else the organization needed to move.
WHAT THE OPERATION NEEDED
When Rulesware mapped the operation, the platforms were functional. The gap was in how they connected to each other, how mandate changes moved from card network guidance into live business rules, and how issuer and acquirer workflows could share context rather than running as separate processes that never met until a deadline forced a handoff. Replacing the platforms would have rebuilt the same coordination problem on newer infrastructure, which meant the real work was orchestrating what already existed rather than starting over.
WHAT RULESWARE BUILT
Rulesware implemented Pega Smart Disputes as the orchestration layer across the full dispute lifecycle, covering both issuer and acquirer workflows across every card type and channel the institution operated. Mandate ingestion was automated so that biannual card network changes moved from guidance document to implemented business rule without manual interpretation cycles each time. The issuer and acquirer workflows were unified under a single coordinated process, eliminating the parallel operation that had forced teams to manage the same case through separate systems. A Blueprint-driven approach meant process gaps were identified and resolved before build work began rather than discovered mid-implementation. A pod-based delivery model kept execution moving at pace without the coordination overhead that traditional project structures create when multiple workstreams share resources and timelines.
THE OUTCOME
The organization reduced the resources required to manage 1.5 million annual disputes by 80%. Compliance cycles that had required manual coordination across teams now ran on automated processes that absorbed mandate changes without a resource crisis each time they arrived. Operations that had run separately across six countries were handling cases consistently, from the same coordinated process, for the first time.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR DISPUTE OPERATIONS AT SCALE
Banks and financial institutions managing disputes across multiple products, geographies, or card types face the same structural problem: functional platforms that do not coordinate, mandate compliance that consumes disproportionate resources, issuer and acquirer workflows that create inconsistency by running in parallel, and a delivery model that treats every biannual mandate change as a one-off project rather than a repeatable process it can absorb without disruption. Rulesware has been implementing Pega in financial services operations for twenty years. We know where dispute operations break down at scale, and we build the orchestration layer that fixes it without requiring organizations to replace what they have already invested in. If your dispute operation is growing in cost and complexity faster than it is growing in capability, that is the conversation to have with us.