Mastercard brings its First-Party Trust dispute rules to Europe, with chargeback protection for merchants that share evidence

Mastercard said on 22 October 2026 that it is extending its First-Party Trust programme, which has run outside Europe since 2024 (the United States first, then Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia Pacific), to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa in October 2026 and across the rest of Europe in July 2027. The programme addresses first-party or 'friendly' fraud, where a cardholder disputes a purchase they actually made.

It has three parts: authorisation insights from Mastercard's fraud models that help issuers separate third-party fraud from first-party fraud and flag the transactions carrying the highest level of trust; evidence supplied by the merchant about the purchase, delivery and authentication of a transaction; and new compelling-evidence rules that include chargeback protection for merchants whose disputes meet the evidence-sharing requirements. Merchants, small businesses included, can submit the evidence either with the transaction itself or later during the disputes process.

Mastercard put global chargeback volume on course for 324 million transactions in 2028, a double-digit increase on the 261 million it forecast in 2025. Michele Centemero, Executive Vice President for Services in Europe, framed the step as building trust across the ecosystem as digital commerce grows.

Chargebacks are one of the few acceptance costs a merchant can neither negotiate nor price into a contract, and first-party fraud is the part of them a merchant loses even when the sale was genuine. The change moves where the burden of proof sits: a merchant that feeds purchase, delivery and authentication data into the authorisation or the dispute gets rule-based protection against the chargeback, which turns dispute handling from a loss to be absorbed into a data-integration project with a measurable return.

That favours merchants and PSPs able to pipe structured order data into the scheme message, which is a capability gap between large platforms and the long tail that acquirers and orchestrators will be asked to close. The staggered dates also matter commercially: EEMEA merchants get the protection nine months before merchants in Germany, France or Italy, so the same dispute carries different economics inside one scheme until July 2027.

Whether acquirers and PSPs in Europe build the evidence-sharing path in time for the July 2027 date or leave smaller merchants without access to the protection, what the compelling-evidence rules require in practice once Mastercard publishes them in its dispute manual, whether issuers accept the authorisation insights and decline fewer legitimate disputes, and whether Visa answers with an equivalent European rule.

• mastercard.com
• Financial IT (full release text, markets and dates), 22 Oct 2026
• Finextra, 22 Oct 2026