How this actually works, without the sales pitch
Written to be useful whether or not you ever talk to us. Where we cannot do something — MATCH removal being the clearest example — these guides say so plainly.
- MATCH list removal: what can and cannot be done A MATCH listing lasts five years and falls off automatically. Only the acquirer that added you can remove it earlier, entirely at their discretion, and only where the listing was made in error or was for PCI non-compliance you have since resolved. No third party can guarantee or perform removal, and anyone charging you for it is selling something they cannot deliver.
- Stripe shut down my account. What to do, in order Work in this order. Secure your data and your customer list before access ends, establish whether the closure was category-driven or account-specific by asking for the reason in writing, find out when your final payout releases and whether a reserve applies, then choose a replacement based on which of those two causes it was. Moving to another aggregator before you know the cause is how merchants collect a second termination, and the second one is what makes a business genuinely hard to place.
- What is a high-risk merchant account? A high-risk merchant account is an ordinary merchant account provided by an acquirer willing to accept categories most processors refuse. The payment rails are identical. What differs is the acquirer’s risk appetite, the price, the reserve, and the fact that card schemes require merchants in certain categories to be registered as high risk, which carries fees that get passed on to you.
- VAMP and BRAM: the scheme rules that decide whether you keep processing Visa's Acquirer Monitoring Program replaced the separate dispute and fraud programmes with a single ratio: fraud reports plus disputes, divided by settled card-not-present transactions. From April 2026 the merchant excessive threshold is 1.5 percent with per-transaction assessments and no warning tier — but only for merchants at or above 1,500 events a month, which is the part nobody quotes. Mastercard runs two separate programmes: ECP for chargeback volume, and BRAM for brand-damaging or illegal activity.
- High-risk merchant account fees, line by line A high-risk quote is not one number. It is a discount rate, a per-transaction fee, scheme registration costs the acquirer passes through, a monthly minimum, gateway and PCI charges, chargeback fees, and a rolling reserve that is not a fee at all but affects your cash more than any of them. The headline percentage is the most quoted and among the least informative. Compare total monthly cost against your own volume, and treat the reserve and the chargeback fee as the two lines most likely to decide whether the account is viable.
- MCC codes, and why yours decides more than you think A merchant category code is a four-digit classification of what you sell, assigned by your acquirer. It determines your interchange, whether you fall into a registered high-risk category, which monitoring programmes apply to you, and how issuers treat your transactions. Merchants sometimes ask to be coded into a cheaper category. That is not a pricing optimisation; it is miscoding, it sits squarely inside the card schemes' integrity rules, and it is one of the most reliable ways to lose an account and land on MATCH.
- Offshore or domestic acquiring, and how to tell which you need Domestic acquiring means an acquirer licensed in the market where your business is established. Offshore means one outside it. Offshore widens category appetite and can be the only route for some businesses, at the cost of higher rates, slower settlement, FX exposure, weaker issuer trust and harder recourse. It solves a problem of appetite. It does not solve a problem of legality, and a business that is unlawful in its own market does not become lawful because the acquirer is elsewhere.
- Rolling reserves, and what they actually cost you A rolling reserve withholds a percentage of every settlement for a fixed period, then releases it on a rolling basis. It is your money and it does come back, but at steady state a 10 percent reserve held for 180 days means roughly 0.6 months of revenue is permanently sitting with your acquirer. The first six months are the painful part; after that, releases and holds balance.
- The Visa Integrity Risk Program, and why your acquirer fears it VIRP is Visa's programme for illegal and brand-damaging transactions, transaction laundering and merchants processing under a code that does not describe what they sell. It replaced the Global Brand Protection Program. The critical structural point is that its penalties fall on the acquirer, not the merchant, which is why an acquirer will exit you on a suspicion rather than wait for proof. It is a different programme from VAMP, which measures disputes and fraud volume, and you can be immaculate on one and in serious trouble on the other.
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Five questions, no documents, and an honest answer about whether placement is realistic for your business.