VAMP (Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program)

What Is VAMP?

The VAMP (Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program) is how Visa watches for payment activity that looks riskier than normal, from abnormal fraud and dispute levels to card-testing patterns. The VAMP program runs every month, and it applies at two levels: an acquirer’s whole portfolio and each merchant inside it.

For ecommerce businesses, the meaning of VAMP is really about how Visa measures payment risk. The current definition of VAMP focuses on card-not-present (CNP) transactions processed through VisaNet, including local and international payments. In practical terms, the VAMP meaning for payment teams comes down to how fraud and dispute activity compares with a merchant’s settled transaction volume.

An acquirer is the bank or processor that handles card payments on a merchant’s behalf. Visa now expects acquirers to police the merchants they sign up more closely, and anyone who crosses the published limits can be told to put risk-mitigation and remediation steps in place. The Visa monitoring program is a move away from chasing only the worst outliers. The aim is to follow risk across a merchant’s lifecycle.

What VAMP Replaced

The name wasn’t new. Visa already had a program called VAMP, then reworked it and pulled older programs under its roof. Two of them mattered most to merchants:

Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP): Aimed at merchants with too many disputes and chargebacks
Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP): Aimed at merchants with too much fraud

According to Visa, the overhaul absorbed five earlier programs covering fraud and disputes, and cut 38 remediation procedures down to one. Merchants used to face a fraud track and a dispute track, each with its own rules. Now everything feeds one score. A low chargeback ratio on its own no longer tells the full story because fraud and disputes now contribute to the same metric.

How the VAMP Ratio Is Calculated

The calculation compares two event counts. Fraud and dispute records make up the numerator, while settled CNP transactions form the denominator.

VAMP ratio = (TC40 + TC15) ÷ TC05

TC40 is the record created when a transaction is reported as fraud.
TC15 is the record of a dispute filed against a transaction.
TC05 is a settled transaction, so it represents the pool of finished CNP sales the top line is measured against.

Dollar values play no part here. A $5 order and a $500 order carry the same weight. Every type of dispute goes into the count, fraud-related or not, because Visa widened the method to take them all in. Watch for double counting, too: If a single sale gets both a TC40 and a TC15, it enters the top line twice.

For example, a merchant logs 400 TC40 records and 1,100 TC15 records against 100,000 settled transactions. That’s 1,500 events on 100,000 sales, a ratio of 1.5%. Visa would call it 150 basis points, since a basis point is a hundredth of a percentage point, which is why its limits read 50, 70, or 150 rather than percentages.

Where the line falls depends on who is being measured:

Acquirer portfolio: 50 bps or higher is Above Standard, 70 bps or higher is Excessive, and a monthly event minimum also applies.
Merchants in the U.S., Canada, the EU, and Asia-Pacific: The excessive merchant threshold dropped from 220 bps to 150 bps at the start of April 2026. A merchant now reaches Excessive at 1.50% or above, provided it also has at least 1,500 fraud and dispute events in the month.
CEMEA: Separate thresholds, with smaller event minimums and a test based on dollar volume.

It’s not all stacked against you. A qualifying pre-dispute service that resolves a dispute early can also fall out of the ratio, as can TC40 fraud that meets the requirements of Compelling Evidence 3.0. But Visa’s data pull time determines whether a case makes it.

Card testing gets its own measurement. An enumeration attack means fraudsters fire off guesses at card details until a combination works. Visa takes the enumerated authorizations and divides them by all authorizations. The enumeration threshold is 2,000 bps (20%), together with at least 300,000 transactions confirmed as enumerated.

Share this article with the world

Related terms

Chargeback Alerts

A standard chargeback can reach a merchant days or weeks after the cardholder contacts their bank, when the options are narrow. Chargeback alerts shift that timing by flagging a transaction while the merchant can still act on it. Here is how that works, how it differs from a regular notification, and who offers it.

Ethoca

Ethoca is a payments collaboration and dispute-prevention company owned by Mastercard, which acquired the company in 2019. At the time, Mastercard framed the platform as a way for merchants and issuers to tackle digital-commerce fraud together, almost as it happens. In practical terms, the Ethoca meaning comes down to a network that lets banks and merchants exchange dispute information quickly enough for the merchant to respond.

Processing

Processing is everything that happens to move money from a customer’s card to a seller’s account after a purchase. At checkout, the customer sees only a brief pause. Behind it, the payment gateway sends the request to the payment processor. From there, it moves through the acquiring bank and card network to the issuing bank, which returns a response.

Chargeback Analyst

A chargeback analyst reviews disputed card payments and helps decide what happens next: accept the dispute or challenge it. Some work in-house at merchants, while others sit at an issuing bank, an acquirer, a payment processor, or a fintech. A merchant chargeback analyst stands on the seller’s side and weighs whether each dispute should be accepted or contested through representment, the step where the business submits evidence that the sale was legitimate.

PAN (Primary Account Number)

A primary account number (PAN) is what most people call a “card number.” It identifies a credit, debit, or prepaid card account and may appear on the card itself. The number is also stored in the card’s magnetic stripe or EMV chip. In payment processing, the term primary account number means the identifier used to connect a transaction to the correct issuer and card account.

BIN (Bank Identification Number)

A bank identification number, or BIN, sits at the very start of a card’s primary account number (PAN), running either six or eight digits long. To get at the meaning of BIN, think about what happens the moment you tap or swipe: Those opening digits tell the network which bank issued the card and where to route it next.

MATCH code

Merchant accounts can end for plenty of reasons, but some terminations carry consequences beyond the current provider. When an acquiring relationship ends and a qualifying risk condition is present, the merchant may be reported to MATCH Pro. The code attached to that record tells future acquirers why the listing was made.

MID (Merchant Identification Number / Merchant ID)

A merchant identification number (MID) is the code used to recognize a merchant account. The acquiring bank or payment processor usually assigns it when the account opens. Think of it as the account’s address inside card processing. It tells banks and card networks which merchant a sale belongs to. In simple terms, that is the merchant identification number definition.

Chargeback Reason Code

When a dispute arrives, the most useful detail is not the amount or the customer’s name. It is the chargeback code attached to the case. That short label tells you what the cardholder’s bank claims went wrong, and it shapes what you gather, what you argue, and how you frame your reply.

Verifi

The Verifi company builds dispute-management and chargeback-prevention technology. The connection behind searches for Verifi Visa dates to 2019, when Visa acquired the company. Ownership doesn’t box the products in, though, as several of them also cover other card brands.

Chargeback Rate (Chargeback Ratio)

A chargeback percentage looks like a simple number, but card networks do not all build it the same way. The formula, measurement period, and transactions counted can all change what the final percentage means for a merchant.

Decline Recovery (Decline Salvage)

Decline recovery, sometimes called decline salvage, describes the work of turning a failed card payment into one that goes through. A decline is not automatically the end of a sale or renewal. Sometimes the issue is temporary, sometimes the customer must take action, and sometimes the payment details on file simply need updating before anything can move forward.