Starting April 1, 2025, Visa will retire its Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP) and Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP) for merchants in the Visa Europe region. These programs will be replaced by an enhanced Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program or VAMP.
VAMP is designed to incentivize merchants to avail themselves of Visa and Verifi’s dispute management services. VAMP will exempt any dispute resolved through Verifi CDRN or Visa Rapid Dispute Resolution from factoring into Visa monitoring ratios. This will also include Order Insight and Compelling Evidence 3.0 deflections, as well as any TC40 notices that are resolved via CDRN or RDR. However, there is a caveat…
THE WAY IT IS NOW
As merchants know all too well, currently chargebacks count against your chargeback-to-sales ratios. Likewise, even if you refund a dispute and preempt a chargeback, it still counts against your fraud-to-sales and dispute-to-sales ratios, both equally important indices to watch out for. When these ratios exceed a certain threshold, your processing fees and penalties increase.
Currently these fraud-per-transaction and dispute-per-transaction ratios are monitored separately; disputes fall under VDMP and fraud is monitored under VFMP. These programs track merchant ratios for their respective criteria and penalize those that exceed the thresholds they set.
WHAT WILL CHANGE?
VAMP changes three key things: How to account for ratios, who is accountable for maintaining them, and what counts & what doesn’t toward the ratios.
HOW: VAMP merges both VDMP and VFMP
Thresholds are set by a ratio that calculates both dispute and fraud volume against overall transaction volume. Specifically, VAMP ratio is the total monthly number of TC40 fraud notices, plus total monthly non-fraud disputes, divided by monthly transaction volume. So for example if your current dispute ratio is .75%, and your fraud is .75% — both compliant btw — your new VAMP ratio is 1.5% and also not compliant.
WHO: There are two tracks for accountability
- VAMP introduces ratio thresholds for acquirers; targeting their total merchant portfolio. Acquirers will have to monitor their portfolio just as merchants have had to monitor their MIDs.
- VAMP also maintains merchant ratios, and they are all considerably tighter considering both fraud and disputes are factored together. That said, merchant can expect an even lower threshold enforced by their acquiring banks.
WHAT: Visa/Verifi resolutions are exempt.
After April 1, CDRN, RDR, and Order Insight with CE3.0 will continue to support EU merchants to reduce dispute exposure, with the added benefit that resolutions through these tools will not be penalized. This hits globally in 2026. And so, Visa is basically mandating that you use their channels to resolve disputes and fraud, without actually mandating it in black & white.
Additionally, Visa is upgrading the technology platform for all Ecosystem Risk Services (ERS) and is launching a new client tool to support the updated VAMP. Visa will continue the monthly monitoring of merchant performance based on card-absent non-fraud disputes, fraud and enumeration activities.
CHARGEBACKHELP IS HERE TO HELP
ChargebackHelp is following VAMP closely as it will enter the dispute management ecosystem. Our EU clients will continue to enjoy the protections that our integrations of CDRN, RDR and Order Insight already deliver, to counter-act the rise in ratios that VAMP will likely create.
As always, clients can reach out to their ChargebackHelp relationship managers with any VAMP-related questions they might have.
If you are considering a partnership with ChargebackHelp, this is all the more reason to build a dispute management strategy with us. Start the conversation today! Send us an email, call us at 1.800.975.9905 or contact us here.