Keep your merchant accounts under the VAMP threshold
What changed
The threshold dropped and the math got harder
In April 2026 Visa lowered the VAMP ratio threshold to 1.5% across the US, Canada, Europe and Asia Pacific. The ratio is fraud reports plus disputes divided by settled transactions, per merchant account. Alerts and pre-dispute resolutions don’t take you out of the count.
For a recurring business the dangerous disputes are the quiet ones: a member who forgot they were enrolled, a rebill they don’t recognize. Those come in waves, they come after the sale, and if you only have one merchant account there’s nothing to do but watch the ratio climb.
How PaymentKit manages the ratio
Ratio management across MIDs
See every MID’s ratio in real time.
PaymentKit tracks disputes, fraud reports, and transaction counts per merchant account and learns the VAMP ratio as it stands today, not when the acquirer’s monthly letter arrives.
Route rebills by risk.
Our risk assessment engine scores each renewal on the signals that predict disputes: customer history, prior failures, BIN, geography, ticket, time since signup. Rebills with higher dispute likelihood are steered away from accounts whose ratio is already elevated and toward accounts with headroom. Safe, long-tenured renewals keep running on the account that needs the clean volume.
Grow the denominator where it counts.
The ratio is disputes over transactions. Keeping a MID processing clean, approved volume keeps its ratio healthy. PaymentKit routes so that an at-risk account stays active on low-risk volume instead of going quiet while the disputes still land.
Reduce the numerator.
Fraud rules at the orchestration layer block the transactions most likely to become disputes before they reach any processor: velocity limits, BIN and country blocks, device and IP signals, card testing patterns. These sit on top of whatever each processor already runs.
Catch disputes before they count.
Through our chargeback partners, pre-dispute alerts (Ethoca, Verifi, RDR) trigger automatic refunds so the dispute is resolved before it posts. Integrated with PaymentKit, so refunds go out without anyone in your ops team touching them.
What this is not
Ratio management, not ratio hiding
PaymentKit doesn’t help you miscode MIDs, split one business across unrelated descriptors, or run volume through accounts coded for a different category. Those get you on the MATCH list. What we do is the thing every multi-MID merchant already tries to do by hand: watch each account, keep each one healthy, and stop one bad month from taking the whole business down.
Who this is for
Multi-MID merchants in the categories where VAMP bites hardest
Subscription merchants in high-risk categories: peptides, nutra, telehealth, adult and dating, AI companion, coaching, digital goods. Anyone who runs multiple merchant accounts and has had one closed for ratio. Anyone with one account who knows they’re a bad month away from a monitoring letter.
Only have one MID? Ratio management needs somewhere to route. We’ll help you get a second account.
Proof
We run 20+ subscription brands on this setup, several in categories where VAMP is an existential problem.
- 20+brands, multiple MIDs each, orchestrated, with ratio visibility across all of them.