Who could’ve imagined, even 14 years ago, accessing an ATM without the unneeded hassle of using a card? Today, that imagination has become a reality, and with it, a myriad of risk points for payment processors and consumers alike.

The surge of eATMs is being rightfully heralded as a breakthrough in customer convenience. However, last February, one customer’s interaction with an eATM in the United States turned out to be anything but convenient.  The customer found themselves locked out of their account and discovered $3,000 stolen remotely from the balance – a nightmare scenario for both the customer and his bank.

“He made the journey to a physical Chase bank location to inquire about his being locked out of his account,” reads an article from technology blog Techaeris, which detailed the incident. “The branch informed him that someone had changed his address and password on his account and that’s why he was locked out. The local branch also informed him that his mobile app had been hacked when he used a Chase eATM machine.”

Chase immediately issued the victim $3,000 in provisional credit while the bank investigated the incident.

“Interestingly,” Techaeris notes, “the user also claims that Chase told him his case wasn’t the only case involving a hacking of the Chase eATM mobile app.” Incidents of online fraud are increasingly common as hackers continue to prey on new technologies and unassuming cardholders to wreak havoc on already strained payment operations.

Committing to technological innovations, like the eATM, is not optional for major payment providers; if companies fail to take advantage of the industry’s latest developments, they will soon fall behind competitors. And since technological innovation is not an option, neither is assuming the risk inherent to adopting those innovations.

Take the industry’s recent transition towards EMV implementation, for example. Major industry players predicted EMV would drastically reduce fraud cases, but, instead, fraudsters simply refocused their approach from card-present transactions to card-not-present transactions. Too often, fraudsters and hackers are one step ahead of the payment industry.

Preventing fraud is truly a never-ending exercise – one requiring adaptation and insight, yet fraud will persist nonetheless. For this reason, investments must be made to mitigate the damage created by fraud, especially in streamlining the dispute handling and chargeback processes.

With disputed payment volumes at an all-time high (and fraud being the predominant culprit), many industry leaders have turned to Lean Industries to mitigate that damage and in turn, benefit the bottom line. While Lean excels in providing dispute management solutions, AdjustmentHub™ goes further than that: it allows your company the added flexibility and freedom to do right by your customers in delivering top-class payment products and services.

All it takes is one mishandled dispute to ruin the public perception of new payment products.  Having a reliable dispute management solution diminishes that possibility.  Without an application like AdjustmentHub™, payment operations simply cannot deliver those innovations to customers with the utmost capability and convenience. Which begs the question: if your company wants to remain on the industry’s cutting edge, why haven’t you engaged with Lean Industries?

After all, from the standpoint of operational efficiency and customer convenience, a world-class, end-to-end dispute management solution like AdjustmentHub™ could make all the difference – particularly when those $3,000 fraud hits occur.

Amanda Cox is a Business Analyst at Lean Industries with over fourteen years of experience in the payments industry. She specializes in client implementations and industry mandates.