Towards a Framework for Handling Disputes in Payment Systems

The ability to support disputes is an important, but often neglected aspect of payment systems. In this paper, we present a language for expressing dispute claims in a unified manner, independent of any specific payment system. We illustrate how to support claims made in this language with evidence tokens from an example payment system. We also describe an architecture for dispute handling. Our approach may be generalised to other services where accountability is a requirement.