About Haykanush Shahbazyan

Haykanush Shahbazyan has spent her career inside the dispute queue - not adjacent to it, not advising on it, but running it. She has built dispute operations from scratch at multiple fintech companies, led both internal and BPO teams, and owned the defensibility of programs responsible for thousands of Reg E and Reg Z investigations. Her work has covered every layer of the function: classification frameworks, triage methodology, investigation logic, QA design, documentation standards, and the operational scaling that separates a clean program from one that breaks under volume.

The throughline of her career is operational judgment. The dispute analyst's job is rarely "did this happen?", it is "given a messy customer story, conflicting evidence, and a partial picture, what is the correct, explainable, and defensible decision?" The senior operators who run mature dispute programs do this work hundreds of times a week, and they do it with consistency that is invisible until it breaks. Haykanush Shahbazyan founded Dispute Academy to translate that judgment into something teachable, repeatable, and defensible at scale.

What Dispute Academy Teaches

Four operational principles anchor everything Dispute Academy publishes, teaches, and consults on.

Correct Classification Above Everything. Most operational failures begin with incorrect classification. AI and analysts both struggle when customer stories are ambiguous. The discipline of identifying what a dispute actually is - before deciding what to do with it -is the foundation every other operational decision rests on.

Defensibility Above Speed. The question is not "did we process it quickly?" The question is "was the decision correct, explainable, and survivable under regulator, network, or internal review?" Speed is a metric. Defensibility is the standard.

Judgment Above Automation. Automation handles patterns. Humans handle ambiguity, edge cases, and conflicting customer narratives where rules and models fall short. Dispute Academy sits at the intersection of operations, human judgment, and AI limitations - the place where the real operational risk lives.

AI Limitations in Dispute Operations. The future is not AI replacing dispute teams. It is operators who understand where AI fails, and who design programs that pair automation with the judgment layer it cannot replicate.

What Dispute Academy Is Not

Dispute Academy is not a law firm or legal advisor. It is not a Reg E or Reg Z compliance certification body. It is not a merchant-side chargeback recovery service. It is not a dispute software vendor or case management platform. It is not a card network training program. It is operational training for the people inside issuer programs, built by someone who has run them.