Legal
Our chargeback ratio has triggered a termination notice.
The mechanism is a card-network monitoring programme. Visa and Mastercard each measure disputes against a threshold, expressed as a ratio of chargebacks to transactions in a month, and enrolment brings escalating monthly fines levied on the acquirer, not the merchant. The acquirer's cheapest response is to terminate, and its agreement usually permits that on notice.
The ratio itself is frequently misread. Because it is measured against the prior or current month's transaction count depending on the network, a fall in volume can raise the ratio while disputes stay flat. Descriptor confusion, unclear recurring-billing cadence, delayed fulfilment, and an absent or hostile refund path generate disputes that were never fraud, and each one counts the same.
A defence has to be built on the acquirer's own reporting, and there is a short window: once enrolment moves to a later stage, the acquirer's discretion narrows.
How LTB Resolves It
LTB reconstructs the dispute data by reason code, descriptor, and billing cycle to separate genuine fraud from friendly fraud, descriptor confusion, and process failure. That analysis becomes a written remediation plan: descriptor and billing changes, a documented refund and cancellation path, pre-dispute alert coverage, and where relevant 3-D Secure treatment of the highest-risk flows.
The plan and the correspondence with the acquirer are handled by LTB, directly across the EU and through local counsel elsewhere, with the objective of holding processing open while the ratio falls. In parallel, LTB prepares a secondary acquiring route with an institution in its network so a termination, if it comes, does not stop settlement. Nothing here is a way around a monitoring programme. The ratio has to come down, and the work is making that happen on record before the account is closed.
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