Payments have undergone significant technological changes over the past decade, particularly across checkout, acquiring and payment acceptance. Yet modernization has been uneven across the value chain: many critical operations on the issuer side remain complex and resource-intensive, particularly payment scheme compliance and dispute management. Both are mission-critical, both grow more demanding as payment volumes and requirementsincrease, and both require deep knowledge of how payment networks operate.
This creates a significant opportunity for Rivero, which builds specialized technology for payment operations, combining deep scheme expertise, network connectivity and an understanding of issuer workflows.
Growing complexity behind card payments
Issuers operate within the continuously evolving requirements of global and domestic payment networks. Visa, Mastercard and other schemes regularly introduce mandates, technical standards, fee changes and operational requirements that institutions need to assess and implement. Card schemes issue hundreds of new rules and updates every month, creating a substantial and growing compliance burden for financial institutions.
Disputes represent another growing operational challenge. When cardholders contest transactions due to fraud, duplicate charges, non-delivery, or other issues, issuers must assess claim eligibility, gather supporting evidence, apply scheme rules, meet strict deadlines, and manage cases through to resolution, including fraud recovery and chargeback processes where applicable.
The volume is increasing materially: Mastercard’s 2025 State of Chargebacks report projects global chargebacks to grow 24% between 2025 and 2028, reaching 324 million annually. Financial institutions already spend an estimated $9–10 on average processing each dispute, before considering the wider impact on customer experience and operational capacity.
This operational burden is likely to grow further with the rise of agentic payments. As AI agents increasingly initiate transactions on behalf of customers, uncertainty around agent identities, authorization mandates and user intent may generate more unexpected or contested payments, driving dispute volumes higher and increasing the need for scalable, automated dispute management.
Turning payments expertise into technology
Rivero addresses these challenges through two complementary products built around the underlying logic of payment operations.
Kajo is Rivero’s payment network compliance platform. It centralizes scheme publications, filters updates for relevance, identifies potential impact, supports prioritization and ownership, and tracks implementation. Rather than simply aggregating information, Kajo converts specialized scheme knowledge into actionable operational intelligence across major international and domestic payment networks.
Amiko automates payment dispute management for issuers, spanning cardholder interaction, case handling, scheme-rule application, fraud recovery and chargeback workflows. Its integrations with Visa, Mastercard, Ethoca and Verifi connect these processes directly with the broader payment ecosystem.
The technology reflects a decisive characteristic of this market: successful automation requires more than software engineering alone. Rivero combines extensive knowledge of payment-scheme rules and processes with network connectivity and a detailed understanding of financial institutions' operational workflows. Together, these capabilities create a powerful competitive advantage, enabling Rivero to translate highly specialized payments knowledge into scalable, enterprise-grade technology.
Modernizing payment operations
This approach is highly consistent with how financial institutions modernize their technology stacks. Core payment infrastructure is rarely replaced in a single attempt, rather, modernization increasingly occurs through specialized components that solve defined operational problems while integrating seamlessly with existing systems.
Rivero’s products address separate but adjacent workflows and are already deployed across numerous banks, issuers, acquirers and payment processors, including institutions such as Swissquote, Advanzia Bank and SIX. The company also works with payment networks and other ecosystem providers.
For financial institutions, the value proposition is tangible: greater operational control, lower manual workload and the ability to manage growing complexity without increasing specialist resources.
Why we invested
We believe Rivero sits at the intersection of several durable trends: digital payment volumes continue to grow, fraud and disputes evolve, scheme requirements become more complex and customers expect faster resolution. At the same time, banks need to modernize operations while improving efficiency and customer experience.
What particularly stood out to us is Rivero’s depth of domain expertise. The company is turning knowledge historically concentrated among experienced payments specialists into technology that can be deployed across financial institutions. Combined with its connectivity to the payment ecosystem and understanding of issuer operations, this creates a strong foundation for Rivero to become an increasingly important technology layer in payment operations.
As the issuer side of payments continues to modernize banks will require greater automation, intelligence and control across increasingly complex workflows. We believe Rivero is exceptionally well positioned for this transition.
We are excited to welcome Rivero to the Elevator Ventures portfolio and to support the team as they continue building the next generation of intelligent payment operations.