Something we keep hearing from acquirers right now:
“We didn’t realise how exposed we were until VAMP hit.”
What is VAMP?
VAMP is Visa’s Acquirer Monitoring Program. It’s how Visa tracks and penalises acquirers whose portfolios carry excessive disputes, and its acquirer-level enforcement only kicked in October 2025. Mastercard’s MATCH programme (Member Alert to Control High-risk Merchants) has been doing something similar for years: blacklisting merchants with excessive chargebacks and penalising acquirers who fail to screen or report them properly.
Both programmes target the same underlying issue: dispute rates. They just hit at different points of the merchant lifecycle. MATCH bites at onboarding and termination. VAMP bites at the portfolio level and stays with you transaction by transaction. Cutting down dispute rates sits at the centre of both.
VAMP dispute rate thresholds and fines
The numbers are tighter than most expected:
- 0.5% of your portfolio flagged = “Above Standard” (1 in every 200 transactions)
- 0.7% puts you in “Excessive” territory
- Fines of $4 to $8 per flagged transaction, applied across the whole qualifying book, not just new transactions
How Mastercard MATCH works
- Acquirers are required to report terminated merchants to the MATCH database
- Failing to report carries its own fines
- Onboarding a MATCH-listed merchant without proper screening creates serious liability
It doesn’t take a rogue merchant to get there. A handful of bad actors across a large portfolio is enough to cause real damage.
Why cutting merchants isn’t the answer
The natural reaction is to pull back. Terminate merchants, slow onboarding, and manually review everything. But that’s just trading one problem for another.
The deeper issue is that most monitoring is backwards-looking. By the time you spot the problem, it’s already in your ratio.
How to get ahead of your dispute rate
That’s where Envisso comes in. Actionable risk insights, a combination of website monitoring and transaction monitoring, and credit protection mean you don’t have to make knee-jerk decisions about your merchant portfolio. We’ve seen first-hand how the right risk infrastructure turns VAMP and MATCH from constant headaches into something you’re actually on top of.
If it’s cutting into your revenue or causing pressure across your portfolio, we’d be happy to have a chat.
