The Blog
Landing in a card scheme monitoring program is not a warning, it is a countdown. This guide explains how Visa VAMP and Mastercard ECM classify merchants, how the ratio is really calculated, what the fines and exit timelines look like, and the moves that actually pull your numbers back under threshold.
20 August 2026
There is one email that changes the mood of an entire finance team in about four seconds: "Your account has been identified under a card scheme monitoring program." No account closure yet, no frozen funds yet, just a paragraph of neutral language and a monthly ratio you have probably never looked at closely.
Most merchants read it as a warning. It is not. It is a countdown. From the month you are identified, you are in a timed remediation window with monthly fines, mandatory reporting and an acquirer that now has a compliance file open on your MID. Get the ratio back under the line and it quietly goes away. Miss it for long enough and you are looking at termination, a rolling reserve increase, and in the worst cases a MATCH listing that follows you to every other processor in the market.
Here is how chargeback monitoring programs actually work, and what you can do once you are already inside one.
Visa and Mastercard do not process your payments. They run the rails and they police the risk on those rails. When a merchant produces disputes and fraud at a rate that costs issuers money, the schemes need a mechanism to force a correction. That mechanism is a monitoring program.
Every month, the schemes calculate a ratio for your merchant ID. If it crosses a published threshold, you are enrolled. Your acquirer is notified first, which is why the message usually reaches you from your payment provider rather than from Visa or Mastercard directly. Your acquirer also carries the liability, so their tolerance is typically much shorter than the scheme's official timeline.
Two things surprise merchants at this point. The first is that enrolment is automatic and formula driven, not a judgement call anyone made about your business. The second is that the fines are billed to your acquirer, who passes them straight through to you.
In 2025 Visa consolidated its older dispute and fraud programs into a single framework, the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program. The important structural change for merchants is that fraud and non-fraud disputes are now measured together in one combined ratio, rather than tracked in two separate programs with two separate thresholds.
That matters more than it sounds. Under the old model, a merchant could sit comfortably below the dispute threshold while running fraud reports that were quietly climbing, and vice versa. Under a combined ratio, both problems now feed the same number. Visa has also been tightening the merchant threshold on a published schedule, so a ratio that was acceptable eighteen months ago may not be acceptable in your next reporting month. Confirm the current figure with your acquirer rather than relying on a number you read in a blog post, including this one.
Mastercard's Excessive Chargeback Merchant program uses a two part test: a chargeback ratio of 1.5% or higher and at least 100 chargebacks in the month. Both conditions have to be met, which is why very small merchants rarely get caught even with an ugly percentage. Cross into 300 chargebacks and a 3% ratio and you move into the High Excessive tier, where the fines escalate sharply and the remediation window gets shorter.
Mastercard also counts differently from Visa. Its ratio uses the current month's chargebacks divided by the previous month's transaction count. If your volume drops, last month's larger denominator flatters you for one cycle, then reality arrives.
The number that decides your fate is a fraction, and almost every merchant fixates on the wrong half of it.
You cannot retroactively remove a dispute from the numerator. Winning a representment gets your money back, but in most program calculations the chargeback still counts. This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in high-risk processing: merchants pour resources into fighting cases they will win on the merits, while the ratio that actually threatens the account does not move at all.
The denominator is settled transaction count, which creates two very different situations that produce identical ratios. A subscription business with rising refund friction at renewal has a numerator problem. A seasonal merchant coming off a peak has a denominator problem, because volume fell faster than the disputes that trail two or three months behind it. The fixes are not the same, so diagnose which one you have before you act.
The pattern is consistent across both schemes:
Worth noting: your acquirer may pull the plug well before the scheme forces the issue. They carry the fines and the regulatory exposure, and a merchant in month four of a monitoring program is a file their own risk committee is asking about.
Since representment does not repair the ratio, prevention is the only lever that moves it in the current month. Dispute deflection networks let you refund a transaction before the issuer converts it into a formal chargeback, which keeps it out of the numerator entirely. The economics are simple to check: cost per alert plus refunded value, against fine exposure plus the survival of the MID.
Fraud disputes now sit inside the same combined Visa ratio as everything else, which makes authentication a ratio tool rather than just a fraud tool. Deploying 3D Secure 2 for high-risk merchants correctly moves liability for authenticated transactions to the issuer, but a blunt rollout that challenges every payment will hurt your approval rate. Selective, exemption aware deployment is the difference between a fix and a self inflicted revenue drop.
A significant share of "fraud" disputes in high-risk verticals are cardholders who did not recognise a line on a statement. A clear billing descriptor with a working phone number, a renewal notice sent before the card is charged, and a refund process that is easier than calling the bank will remove more disputes than any dispute tooling you buy.
Aggressive retry logic on soft declines can inflate fraud reports and cost you the goodwill of an issuer that is already declining you for a reason. Reading credit card decline codes properly tells you which failures are worth retrying and which ones are the issuer telling you to stop.
Cutting traffic to reduce chargebacks lowers the denominator too, often faster than it lowers the numerator. Merchants who panic and pause acquisition frequently post a worse ratio the following month. Route volume intelligently instead of switching it off.
An acquirer in a monitoring situation is managing its own exposure, not optimising your business. This is precisely where an independent partner earns its place: presenting a credible remediation plan in the language the risk team expects, distributing volume across multiple acquiring relationships so a single MID's ratio is not carrying everything, and keeping a backup processing route ready before you need it, not after termination.
At www.nextgenpayment.eu we work with more than twenty acquiring partners and over a thousand active merchant accounts, which means we have usually seen your exact scenario resolved before. The same multi-acquirer structure that helps here is what makes an ISO able to lower your payment processing fees, and it is the reason merchants who work with a specialist ISO for high-risk industries rarely find themselves with a single point of failure.
A monitoring program is survivable. Merchants exit them every month. What decides the outcome is how quickly you stop treating it as an administrative notice and start treating it as a deadline with a formula attached. Know which half of your ratio is broken, prevent disputes rather than only fighting them, and never let one MID carry your entire business.
If you are already enrolled, or your ratio has been drifting upward for a few months and you would rather not find out the hard way, talk to our team at NextGen Payment. We will review your current numbers, tell you honestly how much runway you have, and build the processing structure that keeps you trading.
.png)
