Visa Monitoring Programs Explained (VFMP and VMPI), thresholds, early warnings, and a simple recovery plan

Jan 28, 2026

A chargeback spike can feel like a fever you didn’t notice until it’s already high. One month you’re fine, the next month your processor is asking questions, reserves appear, or your merchant account gets reviewed.

That’s the point of a Visa monitoring program. Visa tracks patterns that signal risk, mainly fraud and disputes, and pushes payment providers to step in when a merchant’s numbers look unhealthy. A rising chargeback rate or dispute ratio can trigger a Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP) review, putting your merchant account at risk. The good news is that most merchants don’t need a massive overhaul to recover. They need fast visibility, tight refund rules, and fewer disputes reaching the network.

This guide explains what VFMP used to be, what VMPI actually does, what thresholds and early warnings tend to matter, and a simple recovery plan to get back to safe territory.

What Visa is measuring, and why it can escalate quickly

Visa’s monitoring approach is built around a simple idea: when too many cardholders report fraud or dispute transactions, trust in the network drops. Visa doesn’t want that, and neither do banks.

Historically, Visa ran separate programs for disputes and fraud. The Visa Fraud Monitoring Program (VFMP) focused on fraud. The Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP) focused on disputes. As of January 2026, VFMP and VDMP are no longer the active programs; they ended in April 2025 and were replaced by the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP), which is now the primary framework that rolls fraud and disputes into one set of checks. Many teams still say “VFMP” out of habit, so it’s worth understanding the language even if the label has changed.

VMPI is often lumped into the same conversation, but it’s a different thing. VMPI (Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry) is a pre-dispute process that helps you answer questions from the “issuing bank” before they become chargebacks. It’s more like a “can you clarify this purchase?” message, not a penalty program.

Two details matter because they explain why merchants get surprised:

1. Visa reviews performance on a monthly cycle, and the review looks backward at the prior month.
2. You usually don’t get flagged for one bad day. You get flagged when the month closes and the ratios look bad at scale. Staying in these programs for consecutive months can lead to significant non-compliance fees imposed by the acquiring bank.

If you want a bank-side description of how the older programs worked (monthly review cycles, remediation plans), JPMorgan’s guide is a useful reference point: Visa dispute and fraud program guide (PDF).

VFMP thresholds and early warnings, plus what matters now under VAMP

Even though VFMP has been retired, its thresholds are still widely quoted because they show the kind of risk levels Visa has historically acted on. Under VFMP, merchants generally had to exceed a rate threshold and a total fraud dollar threshold to trigger action.

Here’s a plain-English snapshot of commonly cited VFMP levels:

Those figures are often discussed in fraud guidance from legacy programs like the Visa Dispute Monitoring Program (VDMP), including this overview: Visa Fraud Monitoring Program guide. Your exact thresholds can vary by region, merchant type, and how your acquiring setup reports metrics, so treat any public number as context, then confirm with your processor.

So what should you watch in 2026, now that the Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) is the active program?

Merchants must now track the VAMP ratio closely. Think in three “early warning” buckets:

• Dispute drift: your dispute-to-transaction rate starts climbing month over month, even if you’re still under the scary line. Monitoring TC40 reports is essential for tracking fraud-to-sales ratio before they become formal disputes.
• Fraud pressure: fraud dollars rise, especially on new customer cohorts or a new traffic source.
• Enumeration attacks: many small authorization attempts or low-dollar purchases that look like bots trying stolen cards.

The most practical move is to track these weekly, not monthly. If your team only checks ratios when statements close, you’re running a business with the dashboard lights off.

For a merchant-friendly summary of how Visa monitoring pressure can affect processing terms, this explainer is a solid starting point: Visa monitoring program overview.

VMPI explained: the “purchase inquiry” that can stop disputes before they start

VMPI (Visa Merchant Purchase Inquiry) sits earlier in the timeline than a chargeback. It’s designed for a common situation: a cardholder sees a transaction, doesn’t recognize it, and taps “dispute” in their banking app. Before the dispute is finalized, the issuer can send an inquiry to the merchant asking for context.

A useful mental model is this: VMPI is a receipt lookup at the issuing bank’s checkout counter. If you can show a clear receipt, delivery details, or subscription history quickly, many cases never become disputes. Providing data through VMPI is part of the new Compelling Evidence 3.0 standards to combat friendly fraud.

A typical VMPI style flow looks like this:

1. The cardholder questions a transaction with their issuer.
2. The issuer sends a purchase inquiry through the network.
3. The merchant responds with helpful data (order details, descriptor info, fulfillment proof, refund status, cancellation history).
4. The cardholder decides whether to drop it or proceed.

VMPI works best when your data is easy to retrieve and easy to understand. That means clear product names, timestamps, customer identifiers, delivery status, and support history. It also means your billing descriptor can’t be a mystery. If your descriptor doesn’t match your website or brand name, you’re creating “I don’t recognize this” disputes for no good reason. These tools are vital for high-risk card-not-present transactions.

VMPI also pairs well with other pre-dispute tools. Prevention alerts like Verifi’s CDRN and Ethoca, along with Visa’s Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR), are built for stopping disputes before they harden into chargebacks, either via alerts or rules-based resolutions. VMPI is part of the same philosophy: fix it earlier, when it’s cheaper.

A simple recovery plan to get out of the danger zone (and stay out)

If you’re near a Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) threshold, speed matters more than perfection. The goal is to reduce the next monthly snapshot and achieve VAMP compliance, not to build a six-month project.

Step 1: Stop the bleed with a tight refund and support playbook

Set a clear rule for when you refund without a fight. If an alert or inquiry shows a likely loss, refunding early can be cheaper than fees, ops time, and ratio damage. Train support to recognize repeat dispute patterns: shipping delays, unclear billing descriptors, subscription confusion, and “never received” claims.

Also remove friction. Make cancellation easy, send renewal reminders for subscriptions, and put a real support channel on invoices and confirmation emails.

Step 2: Fix the root cause, not the symptom

Split disputes into three buckets: true fraud, friendly fraud, and service issues.

• For true fraud, tighten controls (3D Secure (Visa Secure where appropriate, which provides a liability shift for the merchant), velocity limits, IP and device checks, stricter rules for high-risk BINs, and block obvious bot traffic).
• For friendly fraud, improve clarity (descriptors, receipts, order confirmation, and fast responses).
• For service issues, fix the experience (shipping accuracy, delivery proof, clearer policies, faster replacements).

Step 3: Add pre-dispute coverage so fewer cases become chargebacks

This is where tools can do a lot of heavy lifting. Chargebase is a chargeback management platform built for e-commerce and SaaS companies. It connects to your payment provider in minutes (often without code), then helps you act earlier through real-time dispute signals and automated workflows.

Chargebase supports programs like Ethoca alerts, Verifi CDRN, and Visa Rapid Dispute Resolution (RDR), and uses pay-per-alert pricing so you’re not locked into paying for noise. In the pricing examples Chargebase publishes, CDRN and RDR can be around $15 per alert, and Ethoca around $25 per alert, with setup timelines that can be as quick as hours for alerts networks (RDR can take longer to enroll). You can also set automation rules, so the right disputes get refunded quickly and consistently, instead of waiting in a queue.

If you want a practical breakdown of how issuer alerts work day to day, see How Ethoca Alerts Prevent Chargebacks.

Step 4: Prove improvement with a VAMP remediation plan: weekly monitoring and monthly documentation

Don’t wait for Visa’s monthly view to tell you if you improved. Track weekly dispute count, fraud volume, and dispute ratio to identify root causes of churn. Document what you changed, when you changed it, and what happened after. When your acquirer asks for a plan, you’ll have a clean story backed by numbers.

Conclusion

A Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP) isn’t random, it’s a scoreboard based on your VAMP ratio from disputes and fraud, reviewed on a monthly lag. VFMP may be a legacy term now, and VMPI isn’t a penalty program at all, but the playbook to recover is the same: reduce preventable disputes, cut fraud at the source, and handle pre-disputes fast. Maintaining a healthy dispute ratio is the best way to protect your merchant account.

If your numbers are climbing, treat it like smoke in the kitchen. Don’t argue about the brand of the alarm, put out the fire, then install better sensors. Early warning threshold alerts plus a clear response system can keep your payment acceptance stable, and your team out of chargeback triage mode.