The VAMP – Where the Victimized Accounts Meeting their Punishment

As we all know by now, VAMP measures fraud rates and disputes across the aggregated activity of all merchants, sitting under one provider, sharing the same rails.

It was good for VISA – because under this model, payment providers became directly incentivised to monitor merchant behaviour more actively, control, fraud exposure, and tighten onboarding decisions.

However, when payment providers or aggregators assign the same descriptor to multiple merchants, to group together similar activities and traffic, individual merchants can easily become victims due to the collective performance of the group.

If a merchant sits inside a group that performs poorly overall, they can face penalties even with clean operations.

Businesses with multiple or dynamic descriptors are toast.

FinTech changes with the speed of light and translating all new rules into operational understanding and design of how portfolio measurement works in practice is a maze.

Payment providers are profit making businesses which mean they try to sell their products to as many merchants as possible on the lowest possible risk. But merchants have to understand what fits their individual setup and need to be able to defend their own interests. Only education can help merchants to understand descriptors and grouping logic and select partners wisely. The issue is much deeper than it shows on the surface.

Read my article for more! https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vamp-where-victimized-accounts-meeting-punishment-viktoria-soltesz-glx1f