Episode Six & Decisionly team up on dispute automation

Episode Six and Decisionly have partnered to offer card issuers a combined card infrastructure and dispute management service, adding Decisionly to Episode Six's partner ecosystem.

The partnership targets banks and fintechs seeking to connect card issuing systems with software that manages disputes and chargebacks from investigation to resolution. Under the arrangement, Episode Six customers can access Decisionly's platform through an API-based integration.

Dispute handling has become a growing challenge for card issuers as programmes expand across regions, currencies and products. Many still rely on legacy processes that require significant manual work, even as fraud claims, customer complaints and regulatory demands increase operational pressure.

The partnership expands Episode Six's offering beyond core card issuing infrastructure. For Decisionly, which specialises in dispute automation, it opens access to a wider base of banks and fintechs already using modern card systems.

According to the companies, Decisionly's software automates the full dispute lifecycle and is designed to account for regulatory requirements, card network rules and issuer-specific programme settings. They said the platform can automate more than 95% of disputes from the outset and reduce manual dispute work by more than 80%.

The claims reflect one of the main commercial arguments behind the deal. Issuers often treat disputes and chargebacks as a costly back-office function, but technology suppliers increasingly view them as an area where automation can reduce labour demands and improve customer response times.

For Episode Six, the agreement also reflects a broader market shift towards specialist providers connected through APIs, rather than single systems attempting to cover every function. The company operates card issuing and ledger infrastructure in more than 50 countries, serving banks, fintechs and brands across several regions.

Decisionly brings a narrower focus on card dispute operations. Its founding team previously built Chargehound, later sold to PayPal, and said that business processed more than USD $1 billion in disputes for large payments and technology groups.

John Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Episode Six, said the company sees dispute management as an important part of the payments stack for issuers running modern card programmes.

"We built Episode Six to give issuers the infrastructure they need to run modern card programs, and that means addressing every layer of the stack," said John Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Episode Six. "The shift towards purpose-built solutions is accelerating across payments, and disputes is one of the clearest examples of an operational function ready for transformation. By partnering with Decisionly, we can now offer those clients the solutions they need."

Operational pressure

Issuers face rising complexity in dispute operations as card products expand across consumer and business use cases, often across several markets at once. That can create a patchwork of network rules, filing requirements and customer service processes that older systems were not built to manage.

In that environment, dispute handling can become both expensive and slow. Staff often must gather transaction data, assess claim validity, file cases within card network deadlines and communicate outcomes to customers, with each stage creating scope for delay or error if handled manually.

The partnership aims to address that by linking Decisionly's dispute workflow tools with Episode Six's card infrastructure. The companies said their systems serve overlapping markets in the US, Canada and Europe and are built on API-first architectures that allow data to move between them.

That interoperability is likely to matter for issuers that do not want to replace entire technology estates in one step. Episode Six said its infrastructure can sit alongside existing systems or support new card programmes as a core platform, making it easier for clients to add dispute automation without a full rebuild.

Pallavi Kuppa-Apte, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Decisionly, said the deal reflects a shared view that card issuers want more specialised tools across their operations.

"Partnering with Episode Six was a natural fit," said Pallavi Kuppa-Apte, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Decisionly. "We share the same fundamental belief that modern card programs deserve modern technology at every layer, including disputes. Episode Six gives us a direct path to a strong and growing base of banks and fintechs already running on modern infrastructure, exactly the kind of issuers who are ready to unlock the full value of purpose-built dispute automation."