VAMP, ECM, HECM, and EFM carry escalating monthly fines. Know where you stand, what's driving it, and how to remediate before penalties compound.
Visa and Mastercard operate a suite of monitoring programmes that track merchant-level fraud and chargeback metrics on a rolling monthly basis. When a merchant's metrics breach defined thresholds, they are enrolled in a programme — which comes with escalating monthly fines, remediation requirements, and ultimately the threat of losing card acceptance rights entirely.
These programmes aren't obscure compliance edge cases. For any business processing significant card volume, they are a live commercial risk that requires active monitoring and management. The problem is that many businesses don't realise they're approaching — or have already entered — a programme until they receive a notice from their acquirer, by which point fines may already be accumulating.
A merchant in Visa's VAMP programme at the "excessive" threshold level faces $25,000 in monthly fines plus per-transaction fees. For a mid-size e-commerce business, a few months of unmanaged programme fees can represent a significant six-figure cost.
VAMP replaced the older VDMP and VCMP programmes in April 2025. It combines fraud and chargeback metrics into a single ratio — qualifying fraudulent and disputed transactions as a share of total sales. The standard threshold is 0.9%; the excessive threshold is 1.8%. Breaching either triggers monthly fines and requires a remediation plan submitted to Visa via your acquirer. VAMP operates on a merchant MID level — which is why MID strategy matters for compliance as well as routing.
The Excessive Chargeback Programme (ECM) and High Excessive Chargeback Programme (HECM) track chargeback ratios independently of fraud. ECM triggers at 1.5% chargeback ratio; HECM triggers at 3.0%. Monthly fines start at $25,000 for ECM and $50,000 for HECM, increasing with the number of months in programme. Mastercard also operates the VAMP-equivalent Fraud Programme with similar fine structures.
EFM targets card-not-present fraud specifically, tracking fraud-to-sales ratios on a per-MID basis. Fine structures are per-transaction — which means at scale, EFM fines can be significantly larger than the flat-rate programmes. EFM also has a lower activation threshold than ECM, making it a more common entry point for e-commerce merchants.
We calculate your current VAMP, ECM/HECM, and EFM metrics from your transaction and chargeback data — so you know exactly where you stand before your acquirer tells you. This is typically the most valuable first step, because businesses are often surprised by how close to thresholds they are.
Metric breaches have specific causes — particular merchant categories, sales channels, card types, or geographies that are driving disproportionate fraud or chargebacks. We decompose your metrics to identify the specific drivers, which shapes both the remediation strategy and its prioritisation.
We build a structured remediation plan covering: fraud tool changes, chargeback dispute improvements, potential MID restructuring, acquirer communication strategy, and timeline to metrics recovery. This plan is designed to satisfy the requirements of network remediation submissions, not just to reduce metrics in the abstract.
Sometimes the most effective remediation isn't reducing the underlying fraud or chargebacks — it's restructuring which transactions sit on which MID. Isolating high-risk transaction types to a separate MID can protect your primary processing relationship while the underlying issue is addressed. We design MID architectures with compliance implications explicitly considered.
Once remediation is underway, ongoing monthly monitoring is essential to track progress, catch regressions early, and give you early warning of any new threshold breaches before they appear in an acquirer notice.
We calculate your current programme metrics from raw transaction and chargeback data. You'll know exactly where you stand across all applicable programmes.
We identify which transaction types, channels, geographies, or card types are driving metric breaches — and at what volume.
We build a structured remediation plan with clear priorities, expected metric impact per action, and a realistic timeline to bring metrics below threshold.
Where required, we help draft and structure remediation plans for submission to your acquirer and, through them, to the card networks.
Monthly metrics tracking with early-warning alerts if any metric is trending toward a threshold — so you're never surprised by a programme notice again.
Start with a free 30-minute call. We'll give you an honest assessment of where you stand and what's worth tackling first.