Mastercard Collaboration is ending
But maybe it's just the beginning?
Acquirer Collaboration sunsets in January 2027, years of integration work with it. Which raises a bigger question about who should be solving disputes at all.
Mastercard has announced that its Acquirer Collaboration solution will be sunset in January 2027, just a few short years after its launch—and after many acquirers had already invested significant time, capital, and engineering resources to support it.
For those organizations, the transition means more than replacing one service with another. It means another integration, another implementation project, and another reprioritization of already limited development resources.
Setting aside the understandable concerns this announcement may create, perhaps it prompts a bigger question.
Do we really need to accept that portfolio-level dispute prevention requires deep API integrations, months of development, and significant investment—all to support a single payment method?
What if it didn't?
What if an acquirer could deploy a portfolio-wide dispute prevention solution in weeks instead of quarters?
What if it worked across ALL payment methods instead of just one?
What if it required no merchant API integration, allowing merchants to be onboarded in minutes instead of months, even enterprise merchants?
What if the commercial model rewarded acquirers with the majority of the value they create instead of treating them as a distribution channel?
And what if the solution wasn't dependent on the product strategy of any single payment network?
“The acquiring industry has spent decades relying on others to solve the relentless growth in disputes.”
Or perhaps the better question is this.
What if acquirers collaborated with each other to build it themselves?
The acquiring industry has spent decades relying on others to solve the relentless growth in disputes.
Maybe it's time we solved it ourselves?
If you're an acquirer or ISO and you've been thinking about these same questions, let's talk.
