What is CDRN?
October 11th, 2024
CDRN (Cardholder Dispute Resolution Network) is a kind of chargeback alert that is deployed by the consumer bank. It is directly competitive with Mastercard's Ethoca alert product, however has largely been deprecated in favor of Visa's new dispute deflection product, RDR (Rapid Dispute Resolution). RDR has the advantages of wider coverage (RDR works with 100% of Visa cards, compared to CDRN's 30-40%).
For this reason, merchants will not typically use CDRN, except in a few very specific scenarios where it can add value. We do strong recommend against running CDRN if you are also using RDR.
For merchants running Ethoca and RDR, we estimate a 0.2% to 0.4% coverage improvement by adding CDRN, while increasing costs by 20%.
A few advantages of CDRN over RDR:
- It can be deployed in 24 hours, whereas RDR takes 5-10 business days to deploy
- Works with every payment processor
- Allows more bespoke ruleset if you are selectively refunding alerts
- A few Amex/Discover BINs are covered which are not included with Ethoca (5-10% of Discover/Amex volume)
Disadvantages of CDRN:
- Coverage significantly worse than RDR
- More expensive per alert than RDR
- Can cause duplicate alerts if you are running another alert product
We typically recommend CDRN only in the following scenarios:
- Processor does not support the use of RDR (some legacy processors such as JPM Chase Payment Tech and Wells Fargo do not support it)
- Immediate coverage is needed on Visa transactions and 5-10 business day SLA of RDR is insufficient
- Extremely high dispute rate requiring slightly improved coverage on obscure BINS
