Growing your acquiring business just got harder
So where does the next dollar of revenue come from?
VAMP cut tolerance thresholds by roughly 60%. GMAP followed. The old growth play — take on riskier accounts at higher margins — has been repriced.
Two years is not a very long time. But in payments, it has been long enough for the rules of the game to change dramatically. Visa introduced VAMP and began monitoring both acquiring portfolios and merchants more aggressively - reducing tolerance thresholds by a massive ~60% . Mastercard has now echoed this move with GMAP—combining fraud and non-fraud disputes, with acquirer-level thresholds beginning at just 50 basis points.
Each decision makes sense on its own. The networks carry an enormous responsibility for the integrity of the system, and stronger standards are not surprising from that perspective.
But they also force the retirement of old revenue growth strategies.
Take on more risky accounts at high margins is a much less viable option now.
Under the new frameworks, that trade has been repriced. The behavior of the merchants you acquire is now part of your own performance record. The margin is still there—but so is the exposure.
So we need to get creative and explore new ways to grow revenue without introducing additional risk.
Not impossible. Not harder. Just different.
It's always easier to sell a solution to an existing customer, so identifying strong cross-sell solutions makes sense. It's also a very crowded space as payments become more and more commoditized, so offering solutions and services that help you differentiate helps on two fronts.
“What if the next decade of acquiring growth came not from riskier merchants, but from deeper relationships with the ones you already trust?”
The relationship exists. The trust exists. The billing exists. Leverage it.
What if the products you added made merchants stickier, healthier, and harder for a competitor to steal with five basis points?
And what if the next decade of acquiring growth came not from riskier merchants, but from deeper relationships with the ones you already trust?
That brings me to the question I keep turning over, and the one I'd like to ask you. What do merchants actually need, in addition to, and adjacent to, payment processing?
I have some ideas. If you're an acquirer or ISO thinking about the same question, let's talk.
