Topic starter
12/07/2026 12:24 pm
TL;DR: Visa’s updated Acquirer Monitoring Program now counts fraud and dispute events against the same thresholds, and the article says merchants can be flagged when merchant ratios reach 2.2% or when acquirer portfolios hit 0.7%, according to Riskified. The operational lesson is that payment risk is now a governance problem, not just a fraud operations problem.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Riskified: “Navigating VAMP: How Riskified empowers Shopify merchants amidst payment disruptions”.
By the numbers:
- Merchant excessive 2.2% ratio or higher, with at least 1,500 fraud and dispute transactions per month.
- Acquirer excessive 0.7% portfolio ratio or higher.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when fraud and disputes are counted under one payment threshold?
A: Separate fraud and chargeback processes break down because the organisation can no longer treat them as independent problems.
Q: Why can a merchant be penalised even if its own fraud team is performing reasonably well?
A: Because VAMP also creates portfolio accountability.
A: The best approach is a tiered workflow.
Practitioner guidance
- Map VAMP exposure to a single control owner Assign one accountable function to track merchant-level fraud, dispute ratios, and acquirer portfolio obligations so thresholds do not sit in separate teams.
- Shorten the dispute-to-decision path Set a workflow that lets fraud, fulfilment, and payments teams refund, hold shipment, or escalate evidence before a dispute becomes a chargeback.
- Segment high-risk business models Review card-not-present, subscription, digital goods, and cross-border flows separately because those models can accumulate VAMP exposure faster than standard ecommerce.
Bottom line: VAMP turns fraud and dispute handling into one compliance problem, which means merchants need governance across payments, fulfilment, and evidence management.
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12/07/2026 12:38 pm
VAMP is a governance problem disguised as a fraud metric. Once fraud and dispute events are counted together, the control question shifts from catching bad orders to proving that the merchant can manage risk as a monitored programme. That is a material change for ecommerce operations because ownership now spans fraud teams, payments teams, fulfilment, and the acquirer relationship. Practitioners should treat threshold management as a board-visible control, not a back-office exception queue.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Should subscription and digital-goods merchants use different fraud controls?
A: Yes, because those models produce more concentrated dispute and fraud exposure than many standard storefronts. Merchants should use tighter monitoring, clearer evidence retention, and faster exception handling for these flows, since the business model itself can make VAMP compliance harder to sustain.
👉 Read our full editorial: VAMP compliance is forcing ecommerce merchants to rethink fraud controls