If your portfolio carries card-not-present volume, the most consequential number in your risk reporting right now is a ratio you may not be calculating the way Visa calculates it. The Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) replaced a cluster of legacy fraud and dispute programs with a single count-based ratio, and on 1 April 2026 the merchant threshold across the US, Canada, the EU and Asia-Pacific tightened from 220 basis points to 150.
The difficulty for anyone trying to operationalise this is that a great deal of the VAMP guidance published online — including some acquirers' own merchant help pages — still quotes thresholds Visa announced and then withdrew before the program went live. Getting the number wrong in either direction is expensive. Too loose and you learn about it from an enforcement notice; too tight and you decline merchants you should be writing.
Here is what Visa's own program documentation says, as of September 2026, and what it means for underwriting, monitoring and support teams.
What VAMP Replaced
VAMP consolidates the previous Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program, the Visa Fraud Monitoring Program and the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program into one global program. Updates to the program thresholds took effect on 1 June 2025, and the program advisory period ended on 30 September 2025. Programs for Brazil, Chile and India were held back to be announced separately.
The consolidation is the part that changes daily work. Where a risk team previously tracked several programs with their own thresholds, their own identification letters and their own remediation paths, there is now one ratio and one process. Visa has said the change streamlined 38 distinct remediation processes into a single process.
It is also working as intended, at least by Visa's account. In March 2026 Visa reported that among acquirers identified by the program, the VAMP ratio declined 45% quarter over quarter, and that nearly half of identified acquirers improved performance within a single quarter.
The Ratio, Precisely
The core metric is count-based, not value-based:
VAMP Ratio = Count of [Fraud (TC40) + Disputes (TC15)] ÷ Count of Settled Transactions (TC05)
It covers card-not-present VisaNet transactions only, both domestic and cross-border. Two exclusions apply, and both are operational levers rather than footnotes:
- Disputes resolved through pre-dispute solutions are excluded from the numerator.
- TC40 fraud qualified for Compelling Evidence 3.0 is excluded from the numerator.
- Both exclusions are contingent on the timing of the data extract.
That timing caveat matters more than it looks. A case your team resolves after the monthly extract has been taken does not help that month's ratio, even though the work was done. Pre-dispute resolution and Compelling Evidence 3.0 are no longer just a cost-avoidance play for the disputes desk — they mechanically reduce the number Visa scores you on, but only if the resolution lands inside the window.
The count-based construction deserves a second look too. A $12 dispute weighs exactly as much as a $1,200 one. Teams that triage disputes by value — which is most teams, because value is what shows up in the loss line — are optimising a different variable from the one that drives program identification.
The Thresholds Actually in Force
At the acquirer level
An acquirer's portfolio is identified as Above Standard at a VAMP ratio of 50 basis points or higher, and Excessive at 70 basis points or higher. Both identification levels share the same minimum monthly count of fraud and disputes required to enter the program: 1,500 in Asia-Pacific, Canada, the EU and the US, or 150 incidents with an amount of at least USD 75,000 in CEMEA.
At the merchant level
Visa publishes Excessive merchant thresholds by region. Note that there is no published Above Standard tier for merchants — at merchant level, identification happens at Excessive:
- Asia-Pacific, Canada, EU and US: VAMP ratio at or above 150 basis points, with a monthly count of fraud and disputes at or above 1,500. This threshold was reduced from 220 basis points on 1 April 2026.
- Latin America and the Caribbean: VAMP ratio at or above 150 basis points, monthly count at or above 1,500.
- CEMEA: VAMP ratio at or above 220 basis points, monthly count at or above 150 and an amount of at least USD 75,000.
The nesting rule most summaries miss
Visa's fact sheet introduces the merchant thresholds with a conditional that most secondary write-ups drop: the merchant thresholds apply if the acquirer is not already Above Standard or Excessive. Portfolio performance is assessed first, and merchant-level identification is what happens when the portfolio itself is clean.
The practical consequence is that this cannot be managed purely merchant by merchant. A portfolio drifting toward 50 basis points is the more urgent number on your dashboard, because it changes which set of rules you are being measured against at all.
Why So Much VAMP Guidance Conflicts
Before the program launched, Visa circulated a harsher set of numbers: a merchant threshold that started at 1.5% and stepped down to 0.9%, and acquirer bands in the 0.3% to 0.5% range. Those figures were revised after client feedback, and the revisions are what shipped.
By Visa's own October 2025 account of the changes, the revisions included bringing fraud disputes into the equation, excluding pre-dispute tools and Compelling Evidence 3.0 from the calculation so that investment in friction reduction is not penalised, and adding an early-warning mechanism for clients approaching either enforcement level. Visa also published a public-facing fact sheet for the first time.
The result is a body of guidance written against the original proposal that was never corrected. Some of it sits on acquirer and processor help pages, which is exactly where a merchant support agent would go looking. A useful rule of thumb: if a source quotes a merchant threshold of 0.9%, or acquirer bands starting at 0.3%, it is describing a proposal that never took effect in that form. Check the publication date, then check the number against Visa's published fact sheet.
Enumeration Is a Separate Test
Alongside the VAMP ratio, acquirers are required to take proactive steps to prevent merchants from exceeding enumeration thresholds. Enumeration — card testing — is scored on its own two conditions:
- VAMP Enumeration Ratio: enumerated authorisation transactions (approved plus declined) divided by total authorisation transactions (approved plus declined), at or above 2,000 basis points.
- VAMP Enumeration Transaction Count: enumerated transactions (approved plus declined) at or above 300,000.
Two details make this trap teams. It is measured on authorisations, not settlements, so card-testing traffic that never settles still counts in full. And because it is a separate test, a merchant can sit comfortably under the VAMP ratio and still be an enumeration problem — the clean dispute number tells you nothing about it.
What This Changes for Your Team
Underwriting
Card-not-present exposure now carries a portfolio cost that is shared. A single high-dispute merchant consumes headroom that every other merchant in the portfolio implicitly relies on. That is an argument for pricing CNP risk at the point of approval rather than managing it after the fact, and for knowing which merchants are currently spending the most of that shared budget.
Monitoring cadence
Visa evaluates monthly. A quarterly risk review is too slow to be a control — by the time the quarter closes, a merchant could have been identified twice. Monthly is the floor; the teams that stay clear of this generally look at the trend weekly and treat the monthly extract as the scoreboard rather than the first look.
The minimum count is a cliff, not a ramp
A merchant below the monthly minimum count is not identified regardless of how bad its ratio is. That sounds like relief and is actually a hazard: a growing merchant can cross into scope without its ratio moving at all. If your alerting watches the ratio alone, the first signal you get will be an identification. Watch merchants approaching the count threshold as carefully as you watch merchants approaching the ratio.
Support and disputes
Pre-dispute resolution has been promoted from a cost line to a compliance control. Anything that resolves a case before it is recorded as a dispute — and before the monthly extract — is worth more than the same resolution a week later. That is a routing and staffing question as much as a tooling one.
What Visa Does Not Publish
Visa's public fact sheet does not state a fee schedule. Per-transaction figures circulate widely in third-party guidance, but the reported amounts disagree with each other and none of them can be traced to Visa's published material, so we are not repeating a number here. Treat any specific figure you encounter as unconfirmed and get the schedule from your acquirer in writing.
Visa's own direction on the detail is to contact your acquirer, processor or Visa representative. For anything with money attached, that is the answer to use.
The program is aimed at outliers, and Visa has been explicit that most clients will not be affected by it. But the teams that do get caught are rarely the ones with a genuinely broken book. More often they are measuring something slightly different from what Visa measures — dollar-weighted rather than count-based, card-present volume included in the denominator, reviewed quarterly rather than monthly. Align the measurement first. Remediation is a far shorter conversation when the number on your dashboard is the same number in Visa's.
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About the author
Kyle Hall
Founder
Kyle Hall is a fintech entrepreneur, software engineer, and marketing strategist with over a decade of experience in high-risk payment processing and SaaS development. He is the CEO of PayKings, a leader in high-risk merchant services, and the founder of PulseCRM, a purpose-built CRM platform for the payments industry. Kyle specializes in building custom payment processing systems and growth strategies that empower merchant services providers to scale and succeed in the digital marketplace.