Every claim type we work has a paper trail. This one is defined by the opposite: money that was recovered on your behalf, inside the card schemes' machinery, and then never appeared on any statement you hold. You cannot point to the line item, because the entire problem is that there isn't one. Proving an absence takes a different method — but it is provable, and the amounts involved are persistently underestimated, for the simple reason that nobody misses money they never saw arrive.
What scheme passthrough is
When a cardholder disputes a transaction, the chargeback debits travel down the chain: scheme to acquirer, acquirer to PSP, PSP to you. That direction everyone knows, because the debits arrive promptly and visibly.
The chain also runs upward. When a dispute resolves in your favour — a successful representment, a pre-arbitration win, a reversal because the issuer's claim failed — the scheme credits the acquirer, the acquirer credits the institution... and the institution credits you. That last link is passthrough: the contractual obligation to pass on what was recovered for your transactions. The recovery exists at scheme level whether or not it completes the final hop. The lifecycle mechanics are covered in our primer on scheme passthrough; this article deals with what happens when the final hop fails, and how to find it.
Where it sticks
Passthrough failures concentrate at predictable points.
The final hop is the only invisible one. Scheme-to-acquirer and acquirer-to-institution movements are reconciled by professionals on both sides, daily. Institution-to-merchant is reconciled by — usually — no one. The merchant lacks the scheme data to check; the institution has no one checking. Errors, batching shortcuts and "pending" buckets accumulate exactly where audit pressure is lowest.
Terminated merchants are structurally exposed. Disputes outlive accounts. A merchant terminated in March still has representments resolving in June — credits arriving at an institution that no longer has an active settlement relationship to pay them into. Those recoveries land in a closed-account limbo, and an institution already retaining a reserve has little incentive to volunteer that more of your money has arrived. If you have been offboarded, the tail of your dispute pipeline is the first place to look.
Netting hides the residue. Where chargeback activity is reported as a periodic net figure — one line, debits minus credits — individual recoveries stop being individually visible. A net number can absorb a great deal. Gross reporting is where passthrough failures go to be found; net reporting is where they go to stay lost.
Currency and scheme-fee deductions blur the match. A €1,000 reversal that arrives as €912 after conversion and fee deductions is hard to pair with its chargeback by amount alone. Each step may be legitimate; together they ensure that only a case-reference-level reconciliation — never an eyeball over the statements — reveals what is missing.
Platform migrations break the thread. Institutions change processing platforms, merge after acquisitions, and renumber case references when they do. Recoveries in flight during a migration are the likeliest of all to fall between systems — and the hardest for the institution itself to find later. If your relationship spanned a rebrand or a migration, treat the months around it as a zone of special interest.
How the absence shows in the accounting
You cannot see a missing credit. You can see its silhouette, in three places.
The win-rate gap. Your dispute portal records outcomes: disputes fought, disputes won. Your statements record credits. Count both for the same period. A merchant who won 161 representments and can find 118 reversal credits has 43 silhouettes — before pairing a single case.
The unmatched residue. Pair statement credits to dispute cases by reference, as in the deductions article. Work conservatively: where a credit could match two cases, give the institution the benefit. What survives honest pairing is not noise; it is a list, with case numbers and amounts.
The post-termination silence. List every dispute still open on your termination date and its eventual outcome. Then look for any post-termination credit at all. Disputes resolving after offboarding produce recoveries; an account that received none either lost every late dispute — checkable — or the recoveries stopped one hop short of you. This is the fastest of the three checks, and for terminated merchants it is usually the most productive one.
Putting a number on it
Before demanding anything, size the problem honestly, because the reconciliation cuts both ways. Some silhouettes have innocent explanations: a reversal netted against a scheme fee in the same batch, a credit posted under a different case reference after a reopened dispute, a timing difference that resolves one statement later. Run those explanations down first — strike every silhouette that survives them off the list yourself, before the institution does it for you. What remains is a conservative quantum, and conservative quanta are the ones that hold up. A list of 43 missing credits that shrinks to 31 under the counterparty's scrutiny reads like an estimate; a list of 28 that survives intact reads like a finding.
The evidence this claim needs
The reconciliation above gets you a credible suspicion. Converting it into a quantum needs the underlying records, and the asymmetry here is the defining feature of the claim: the institution holds the half you cannot see.
What you hold — secure it per the 30-day checklist, before portal access closes: complete dispute-level records with case references, reason codes and outcomes; gross-level statements for the full relationship; and the agreement's provisions on chargeback handling and passthrough.
What the institution holds, and what a written request should ask for: the scheme-level reconciliation for your merchant ID — what was credited to the institution in respect of your transactions, case by case — and where each credit went. Ask specifically. "Please confirm all recoveries have been passed through" invites a one-line yes; "please provide the scheme credit corresponding to case 4711-XXXX" has to be answered or visibly dodged. Either response builds the file: this is the same principle that runs through every claim we work — the written question, the dated non-answer, the documentary record doing the arguing.
An institution confident in its passthrough produces the reconciliation. An institution that answers a case-level question with a process description has located the claim for you.
Why this claim is worth running alongside the others
Scheme recovery claims rarely travel alone. The conditions that produce them — weak final-hop reconciliation, net reporting, a terminated relationship — are the same conditions that produce unsupported deductions and stretched reserves, which is why we assess them as one file rather than three. And the passthrough piece punches above its size: it is concrete and case-referenced in a way that changes the tone of everything around it. An institution explaining 43 specific missing credits defends its "ongoing risk review" with noticeably less conviction.
If your win rate and your credits have never quite agreed — or you were terminated with disputes still open — submit a fit check. Five minutes, eight fields, no upfront cost, an initial view within five business days.
This article is for information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.