PEP Episode 078 — Taming Chargebacks With Real AI Agentics | With Special Industry Insider ChargeFlow & Ben Herut

Too many merchants breathe easy under legacy chargeback ratios, only to be blindsided when their PSP tightens the screws. We sit down with Ben Herut, co-founder at ChargeFlow, (https://www.chargeflow.io/) to unpack the shift toward post-payment risk and why Visa’s VAMP is forcing acquirers and processors to act earlier—and harder—on portfolio-level exposure. If you rely on card rails for growth, this conversation shows how to protect revenue without clobbering conversions.

We trace Ben Harut’s path from engineering to payments risk and dig into how ChargeFlow uses post-payment data, alerts, and AI-driven workflows to cut chargebacks and protect revenue. We also break down Visa’s VAMP, why PSP thresholds change the game, and how merchants should respond.

• career path from engineering to payments risk
• bank-side underwriting, KYC, fraud and chargebacks
• founding in high-risk and lessons learned
• what ChargeFlow does post-payment and pre-fulfillment
• risk scoring using cross-merchant and outcome data
• handling alerts including TC40 and RDR
• strategies to refund or fight disputes
• AI agents for representment and QA feedback loops
• what VAMP changes for acquirers and PSP thresholds
• portfolio-level risk, BIN pressure, and early enforcement
• why proactive prevention protects processing access

We start with Ben’s journey from electronics engineering to bank-side risk, through launching an EMI in the high-risk space. That experience shapes a practical view: fraud prevention cannot end at authorization. ChargeFlow focuses on the critical window after approval and before fulfillment, where merchants can use post-payment data, cross-merchant signals, and scheme alerts like TC40 and RDR to flag risky orders, request verification, or cancel before losses mount. For digital goods and financial products, we explore how delayed access flows and behavioral patterns unlock smarter decisions than blanket declines.

When disputes hit, evidence wins. Ben explains how AI agents compress months of training into days, assembling compliant, precise representments and feeding results back into models. The goal isn’t buzzword AI; it’s a genetic workflow with guardrails, explainability, and QA loops that cut manual work and raise win rates. We also compare refund-first versus fight-first strategies, and where high-value transactions justify the extra effort.

Then we tackle VAMP’s impact. Even “safe” merchants can trigger portfolio pressure at the BIN level, prompting PSPs to hold payouts, request mitigation plans, or offboard accounts. Understanding tighter PSP thresholds, modeling risk appetite, and staying current with card scheme changes are now core operating skills. Whether you sell physical products or digital access, the path forward is clear: centralize post-payment risk scoring, handle alerts with discipline, and standardize dispute workflows so your team can focus on growth.

If this episode helps clarify your approach to chargebacks, subscribe, share with your ops or finance team, and leave a quick review—what’s your stance today: refund or fight?

*Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice.  All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.*

Transcript

James Huber (00:00):

So what about, I’m sure you’re probably actually excited about the Vamp might be one of the few people that are actually looking forward to this, that’s your real advanced Salesforce, but what are your thoughts on, now that we’re into it, what are your thoughts on Vamp

Jeremy Stock  (00:20):

Overall? Welcome to the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode. Really excited today. We’ve got in-studio joining us, our managing partner of the law firm, James Huber, as well as our special guest joining us from Israel, Ben Harout of Charge Flow. You can find Ben over@chargeflow.io. Ben, we’re really excited for you to make this podcast with us. We get the fun topic of talking about your business and chargebacks and that whole world. Welcome.

Ben Herut (01:00):

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

James Huber (01:02):

Yeah, Ben, why don’t you tell us, I mean, I’m always curious about how people find themselves in this industry. Once you’re in, it’s really no getting out. It’s like the Crips.

Ben Herut (01:14):

That’s true. So actually it’s a funny story we talked about previously about how we got into the business, and to be honest, I started as an electronics engineer. So I worked for about three years in electronics firm, r and d, and then I moved into analytics and then I went to honeymoon with my wife in Mexico, and then she saw on Instagram a post by a friend saying that she just relocated to London. And my wife said, you know what? It sounds interesting to live in Europe now. Me as a child, I lived for six years in Paris, so I was kind of accustomed to living in Europe. So you know what? Let’s give it a try. So we actually started looking for opportunity, and then I found one as a risk analyst in an acquire bank in Germany. So

James Huber (02:00):

Your wife saw someone on Instagram and got jealous and was like, we’re moving halfway around the country.

Ben Herut (02:06):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is how it started essentially. Then once, as you mentioned, once I went in, there’s no going back.

James Huber (02:14):

There’s no going back. So you were a risk analyst. What were you doing at the bank specifically? Generally?

Ben Herut (02:21):

Well everything, to be honest, from monitoring risks from merchants and doing compliance and underwriting, then KYC and whatnot, everything that had to be done. Yeah, I did it for about two years. Then I moved to an issuer bank in Germany as well, N 26. It’s an Ausra German bank. Then I also managed the chargebacks and card fraud prevention teams, and I just continued from there.

James Huber (02:48):

And you realize a lot of people, after you’ve worked at the bank for a few years and you’re working with all these people and you’re, they’re making a whole lot more money than I am.

Ben Herut (03:02):

I mean, to be honest, one of my latest positions before this one, before the current one, I actually opened an EMI in the Netherlands with a partner, and it was in a high risk space, and this is where you do actually make the real money. But it’s risky.

James Huber (03:20):

But it’s risky. Yeah, high risk, high reward. Are you running cross border with the us?

Ben Herut (03:27):

Yeah, so currently at Charge Law, we do have a team situated in New York. They’ve got an office. We’ve got some people in Canada and Europe as well, and the main headquarters are in Israel. So we do actually all over the place. I try to get as much into conferences, Europe and the US and just getting together with the payment experts whenever I can.

James Huber (03:51):

Why don’t you tell us about Flow then?

Ben Herut (03:54):

So essentially Flow helps merchants recover loss revenue and reduce charge with complexity. The idea is that we understand the domain itself and we’ve developed an internal tool that use agent workflow, but real ai, not like everybody like to use this buzzword. So essentially part of the time I actually prompt engineering some agents and we are able to provide a hands-free solution for merchants that deal with chargeback issue. And to be honest, anyone who uses cards for the payments has a chargeback issue.

James Huber (04:33):

Right. So is it helping with the dispute, the chargeback? Is it helping trigger reversals? Is it stopping ’em before it happens?

Ben Herut (04:46):

All of that? Yeah, so all of the above. Essentially we come in post-payment, right? We’ve got the whole prepayment set up, we’ve got different fraud prevention firms, but we go just after the payment was approved and essentially before it was let’s say fulfilled, if we’re talking about physical goods then before the goods were shipped. So we have a very unique product that we’ve just developed that sort of aggregates risk signals to essentially tell the merchants whether payment was risky or not, and then it gives them a chance to either cancel it or require additional verification. Then we move on to the alerts, and by alerts I mean TC 40 at the car, C-D-R-N-R-D-R and all this good stuff. And then if everything still passes through, then we’ve got the chargeback recovery product. So anything after the payment was made,

James Huber (05:43):

How do you deal? So I can appreciate it as before the goods are sold, but how do you deal with a company that’s selling a financial product? So let’s say like a real estate investment company of here, I’ll process a million dollars on my debit card to invest in this real estate. How would you help someone like that?

Ben Herut (06:13):

So essentially it really depends on the merchant itself. If they have some sort of a mechanism that requires some time before the payment is actually processed, and between the providing access to whatever the non-physical good is, then we are able to step in and we have some sort of a consortium of data from all of our merchants, and we process a little over 15,000 merchants. We’ve got a big knowledge base and data that we can utilize, and then we are able to incorporate both behavior signals, just data related signals, as well as chargeback signals, which is something that’s mostly lacking in the fraud prevention films. They do not see after the payment was done. So we take all of this, we throw it into a model that we’ve developed internally, and then we are able to generate some sort of a risk score plus explainability version or layer on top of it.

James Huber (07:15):

So in this situation, the merchant would take this money and they might go, oh, hey, hold on, this looks a little iffy. Why don’t you double check and maybe don’t authorize

Ben Herut (07:33):

It. Exactly, exactly. Because essentially using the cards, you leave traces, you use your card in different places, not just with the real estate agent. So if this other payments were captured by our environment, then we are able to get some signals from the other purchases that were made. And this is how we are able to cross-function the data from different sources. And we see it quite a lot. I just had a conversation last week with a social gaming merchant, and they mentioned the fact that they tried to use some sort of a product or similar product, but the outcome was that all of their customers were risky. Well, it’s a risk high risk merchant, right? So essentially you have to some sort of tweak the model to accommodate the risk level of the industry that this is something that we achieved.

James Huber (08:31):

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I guess there’s no perfect solution and there’s always people that get through. How do you deal with the people that get through? If I’m using your company and I’m going, oh, hey, you’re supposed to tell me now that this a million dollar chargeback.

Ben Herut (08:53):

Well, it really depends on the risk appetite of the merchant itself. Some merchants would like to what just refund everything, which is risky. Anything that we get an RDR for or something, just refund it and let it be done with. And some merchants have the appetite to what? Let’s try to fight the chargebacks because the high value. So it’s really up to the preference of the merchant itself.

James Huber (09:17):

And then does your company help with fighting the chargebacks too?

Ben Herut (09:20):

Yeah, definitely. So what we did is we developed an internal mechanism that uses igenic workflow essentially. I’ve trained in the past so many live human agents, and I would say typically it takes about six months until someone is qualified enough to really handle a chargeback. But then you can do the same thing with an AI agent within let’s say, two, three weeks, to be

James Huber (09:45):

Honest. That’s

Ben Herut (09:46):

Interesting. I mean doesn’t, yes, you do have to take care of hallucination, but if you prepare a good rug and a good knowledge base and you are able to curate along the way and have some sort of a feedback loop of the results, you are able to maintain a machine that is somewhat human but doesn’t do human mistakes.

James Huber (10:08):

That’s pretty amazing. So what about, I’m sure you’re probably actually excited about the vamp might be one of the few people that are actually looking forward to this. That’s your real advance Salesforce, but what are your thoughts on, now that we’re into it, what are your thoughts on vamp overall?

Ben Herut (10:33):

Right, so vamp as any Visa announcement is something that which is rolling. It’s a live piece that changes and adapt and so on. And usually when they post the first initial announcement, then nobody understands it, then they do some recalibration, then still nobody understands it. It’s a back and forth. But essentially the idea is that now acquires and processes are going to be accountable for managing the risk, that portfolio. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see merchant doing is saying, you know what? My thresholds are now so high. I’m not even close to a thousand chargebacks or TC 15, TC 40, I’m not even close to 1.5%, so I’m fine, nobody cares. But then the reality strikes, and then essentially since the PSP itself has a much lower threshold, like 0.3, 0.2, it means that any merchant, which higher than 0.2, 0.3, is going to negatively impact the PSP itself. Which means that without any written regulation, the PSP might block out payouts, close accounts, just do risk assessments and so on. So it’s like merchants need to understand that though they’re not close to the ratio, they are going to be impacted.

James Huber (11:56):

That’s right. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s the scary thing. I talked to big ISO owners and they’re going, oh, we’re low risk, what do we care? And I’m like, do you know which bank you are at? They might,

Ben Herut (12:09):

Which bank was it?

James Huber (12:11):

Well, it doesn’t matter any of the banks at the bin level. So I think it’s way more problematic, but to your point, they’ll roll it out. If it blows up like everybody like it, I guarantee it will. If it’s enforced in its current structure, then they’ll just change it.

Ben Herut (12:35):

So essentially it started on the 1st of October, the enforcement period, and I’ve already received letters from psps to merchants saying, you know what? You guys are too risky, provide us with a mitigation plan, even though they’re nowhere close to the threshold.

James Huber (12:50):

Right? Right. Yeah, you just want that good stuff. So I feel like I’ve learned enough. What else do you want to tell us about charge flow? You get the last word.

Ben Herut (13:03):

Okay, so I mean essentially, as I mentioned, charge flow. We’ve built a universal solution for merchants and the psps or the platform that support those merchants. Charge mix are manual, charge mix are confusing, and charge mix are not the main business of a merchant. They should focus on selling whatever they sell, not on doing chargebacks. I always give this example, if you’re sick, you’re going to go to the doctor. If you have a lawsuit, you’re going to go to a lawyer. You’re not going to try to represent, I mean you can, but yeah, you know how the outcomes be. So all we do is we do chargebacks, recovery, and prevention. So the idea is that we are on top of all the changes. You mentioned damp, there are so many changes. Every six months or so, the card schemes are having a different announcement coming out. So we get this all into our models and we try to provide a full hands-free solution for merchants. They could be involved if they want it. It’s fully customized, but the idea is that we just take this burden off and let them focus on actually revenue production.

James Huber (14:16):

Alright, great. Well thanks for coming on. We like to keep these short because at the end Jeremy always says thank you for listening to this. Go on and on and on. But yeah, thanks for coming on. I think your product is definitely something that people can benefit from and then also be a little bit scared of.

Ben Herut (14:37):

Yeah, hopefully both. And thank you so much for having me. It was a great pleasure.

James Huber (14:43):

Alright, thanks Ben.

Jeremy Stock  (14:44):

Thanks so much Ben. And as James mentioned, thank you for listening this long to the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of Global legal law firm. Please go visit our special guest, Ben Harout over@chargeflow.io, all the information down below. And as always, we’ll see you on the next one. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts Podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. Visit us online today at global legal law firm.com. Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.