For years, the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) has operated with a certain level of “cushion.” Merchants and fintech platforms often treated compliance as a reactive exercise: wait for a warning, adjust the filters, and move on.

That era officially ends in April 2026.

This is the moment where Visa meaningfully tightens enforcement, lowers acceptable thresholds, and removes the remaining buffer many platforms have been relying on.

The result is a shift toward automated enforcement, faster account action, and significantly less tolerance for merchants who don’t actively manage fraud and disputes. If your current strategy is to react to warnings after they arrive, you are already behind.

What changes in VAMP in April 2026?

While previous cycles introduced minor adjustments, April 2026 is the true enforcement inflection point. As of April 1, 2026, the threshold for “excessive” disputes and fraud drops to 1.5%, down from the previous 2.2%. This compression means that businesses previously considered “healthy” will suddenly find themselves in the crosshairs of automated enforcement.

The calculation logic itself is also evolving. Under the new standards, the VAMP ratio will combine fraud reports (TC40) and all disputes (TC15). This creates a “double-counting” effect where a single incident can be counted twice if it involves both a fraud report and a dispute.

Simultaneously, acquirers are facing their own stricter “above standard” thresholds of 0.5%, forcing them to apply unprecedented pressure on their merchant portfolios to maintain compliant ratios.

The new VAMP standards at a glance

An example scenario of how this plays out

To understand how the April 2026 changes increase your risk, consider a merchant processing a steady volume of 15 orders per day. In a standard 30-day month, this merchant processes 450 total orders.

It’s important to note that dollar value does not matter here. Visa calculates your VAMP status based on the count of incidents, not the total revenue lost. Whether a dispute is for $5 or $5,000, it counts as exactly one hit against your ratio.

Under the “double-counting” rule, just four customers filing both a fraud report and a dispute would result in 8 total incidents—pushing this merchant immediately into the “Excessive” category.

Why stricter VAMP enforcement may feel sudden to merchants

For many leaders, VAMP risk feels like a “black box” until a suspension notice arrives. This isn’t necessarily due to merchant negligence, it’s often a fundamental failure of payment architecture.

Most standard payment processors simply don’t surface the data Visa actually cares about in real time. Because growth, seasonality, or traffic anomalies can spike ratios without obvious fraud, a merchant might believe they are safe while their actual VAMP ratio is silently spiraling toward an enforcement trigger. By the time these ratios are calculated by an external entity, enforcement decisions are often already queued.

Modern platforms also optimize for speed and portfolio-level consistency rather than nuanced individual explanations. Linked accounts, prior flags, or unusual traffic patterns can trigger automated actions before a human ever looks at the file. Because reviews typically happen after access is restricted, and appeals move slowly through massive risk queues, reinstatement timelines often feel arbitrary and disconnected from the merchant’s reality.

When “easy payments” put your marketplace at risk

Many merchants utilize all-in-one platforms like Shopify to get started quickly, but they eventually outgrow the reactive risk model these platforms employ.

Because Shopify Payments often relies on Stripe—which functions primarily as a processor without deep upfront underwriting—it relies on reactive reviews rather than proactive evaluation.

This creates a significant risk for scaling businesses. When automated systems flag a store for fraud or unusual traffic, the enforcement is often total.

Merchants face a sudden loss of payment support with limited explanations, and in severe cases, entire admin panels are locked. This prevents merchants from fulfilling orders or even communicating with their customers. This “reactive review” model leads to sudden account terminations to mitigate the platform's own VAMP exposure, causing liquidity shocks where funds are frozen for 3 to 14+ days.

Metrics that actually put you at risk

To survive the April 2026 shift, you have to understand the logic of the network: “friendly fraud” is now just as dangerous as outright criminal fraud.

Exceeding the new limits doesn’t just result in a warning, it can lead to higher fees, mandatory remediation programs, or placement on the MATCH list. Being placed on the MATCH list effectively blacklists a business, making it nearly impossible to secure payment processing elsewhere.

To keep disputes out of the formal VAMP calculation, proactive prevention through tools like Order Insight, RDR, and Ethoca/Verifi is no longer a luxury, it’s a requirement.

What happens when your payments are suspended?

A VAMP violation is a liquidity shock that cascades through your entire business. Settlement usually pauses before communication happens, and reserves become inaccessible even when those balances were “earned” from legitimate sales.

When operations stall, the inability to issue refunds leads to more disputes, which further inflates your VAMP ratio in a dangerous feedback loop. Support teams lose access to payment history, and sellers or vendors will churn the moment payouts stall. This trust erosion compounds much faster than the original violation.

What a VAMP-resilient payment stack looks like

Resilience is a design choice that prioritizes prevention over reaction.

A modern payment architecture should maintain a strict separation of concerns between commerce, payments, and funds custody. This ensures that if one part of the system is under review, the rest of your business operations, like order fulfillment and customer communication, can continue uninterrupted.

Furthermore, visibility must be a first-class requirement, ensuring you see the same real-time risk scoring and VAMP-style metrics that the networks see.

How to prepare before April 2026

The countdown to the April 2026 enforcement shift has started. You should take three specific actions today:

1. Audit your current VAMP exposure

Determine what risk signals are actually visible in your dashboard today and identify where your fraud and disputes are originating.

2. Stress-test a payment suspension

If payments paused tomorrow, identify what would break first, how long you could operate without settlement, and who internally owns the resolution process.

3. Choose a payment platform that mitigates your risk

Move toward infrastructure that optimizes for merchant continuity through proactive risk monitoring and clear communication.

And unlike reactive platforms that optimize for their own protection, Coinflow optimizes for merchant stability. We provide chargeback indemnification to stop fraud and friendly fraud before they ever inflate your VAMP ratios. By offering instant settlement to a Coinflow wallet where you have full ownership, we help you avoid prolonged fund holds.

Our decoupled infrastructure ensures your business operations continue even during reviews, and our transparent risk signals enable behavioral correction before thresholds are ever crossed. We provide a white-glove support and integration team to ensure you have predictability, transparency, and control over your payments.

Have a chat with our team, and don’t wait for an automated termination to find out you aren’t ready for 2026.