Tandem Credit Union serves 310,000 members across Washington and Oregon from 34 branches. Its member contact center takes about 95,000 calls a month. The busiest line is the card line: debit and credit card disputes, lost and stolen cards, travel notices, and declined transactions.
Card calls are high stakes for a credit union. A member who sees a fraudulent charge wants help now. And each dispute starts regulatory clocks that the credit union has to meet, every time.
The challenge
By 2024, average hold time on Tandem's card line had reached 11 minutes. Monday mornings were worse. Dispute calls averaged 14 minutes of handle time, because agents had to collect transaction details, classify the dispute, apply the right rules and document everything for the back office.
The rules are strict. For debit card disputes, Regulation E requires the credit union to investigate promptly and, if the investigation takes longer than 10 business days, to give the member a provisional credit. For credit card billing errors, Regulation Z sets its own timelines and notices. Classifying a dispute wrong on the first call can put the whole case on the wrong clock.
Tandem's compliance team had found a 3% error rate in dispute intake classification during its 2024 internal review. None had caused a missed deadline yet. Everyone agreed it was a matter of time.
Security was the other constraint. Card numbers could not go anywhere they didn't need to be. Any AI on the card line had to meet PCI DSS and keep full card numbers away from language models entirely.
"We weren't willing to trade compliance for speed. The only option was a platform that made both better at once." — Janelle Ortiz, SVP Member Experience
Why Pazau
Tandem looked at three voice AI vendors in the spring of 2025. Two couldn't explain what would happen to card data during a call.
Pazau could, in detail.
PCI-safe voice by design. Pazau Voice is covered by Pazau's PCI DSS attestation (SAQ-D for voice payments). When the member needs to share a card number, the call switches to a secure capture mode. The member enters the number on the keypad; the tones are captured by the payment-secure layer and the audio is paused, so the number never appears in the transcript or recording. Pazau Guard redacts any card number spoken aloud before inference. The model sees a token, never the PAN.
Rules as Procedures. Tandem's compliance team could read the Procedures that govern the AI, line by line. Reg E and Reg Z classification became explicit steps, not training examples.
Traces for examiners. Every call produces a trace: the Procedure followed, the data used, the Actions taken, the disclosures read. Traces export in a format Tandem's compliance team can hand to NCUA examiners.
Tandem's Chief Risk Officer also required a written commitment that member data would never be used to train models. Pazau's standard terms already said so.
The rollout
June 2025: lost and stolen cards. The first Procedure was the simplest and the most urgent. After identity verification, Pazau Voice blocks the card with block_card, which integrates with Tandem's card platform on Fiserv, and orders a replacement with reissue_card. Members get a confirmation by text. This went live in three weeks.
July: travel notices and declines. The Declined transaction Procedure reads the decline reason with get_auth_history and explains it. If the decline was a fraud-rule hit, the member can confirm the transaction and the agent releases the block.
September: dispute intake. The Card dispute intake Procedure is the core of the program. It verifies the member, identifies the transaction with get_transactions, and asks a short set of questions to classify it: unauthorized, goods not received, duplicate charge, or incorrect amount. Then it branches.
- Debit card (Reg E): Pazau opens the case with
open_dispute_case, which starts the investigation timer in Tandem's case system. It reads the member the required disclosures. If the case is still open on business day 9, Pazau flags it; on day 10,issue_provisional_creditposts the credit and notifies the member. - Credit card (Reg Z): Pazau follows the billing-error path, confirms whether the member has already notified in writing, and sends the written acknowledgment on the required timeline.
Compliance reviewed every script for UDAAP risk. The AI never tells a member a dispute "will" be approved, and never discourages a member from filing. It hands off to a human for any dispute over $2,500, any member who asks for one, and any call where Pazau detects signs of elder financial abuse.
"Before go-live, we simulated the dispute Procedure against 4,000 recorded calls. It classified them more accurately than our own intake did. That was the moment our risk committee said yes." — Marcus Adeyemi, VP Compliance & BSA Officer
The results
Tandem measured results over the twelve months to August 2026.
- Pazau Voice completes 58% of card dispute intakes end-to-end, from verification to case open, with no human involved.
- 100% of Reg E provisional credits were issued on time. Automated day-9 flags and day-10 credits removed the manual tracking that caused near-misses.
- Average hold time on the card line fell 63%, from 11 minutes to about 4, and to under 1 minute outside Monday mornings.
- Classification errors in dispute intake fell from 3% to 0.4%. Insights scores 100% of card calls for compliance, not the 2% the QA team used to sample.
- Zero card numbers in transcripts or recordings, verified quarterly by Tandem's internal audit.
Tandem's 2026 NCUA exam included a review of the card program. The compliance team exported traces for a sample of 150 disputes in under an hour.
What's next
Tandem is extending Pazau Voice to its loan-servicing line in the fourth quarter of 2026, starting with payment-date changes and payoff quotes. Pazau Insights is also watching for early signs of new fraud patterns: in May 2026, it spotted a cluster of "goods not received" disputes tied to a single online merchant three weeks before the card network flagged it.
"Our agents used to spend their day reading disclosures. Now they spend it with the members who need a person. That's what a credit union is supposed to do." — Janelle Ortiz, SVP Member Experience