MMGCorporation

The MMG team will be at Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam next week — June 2–4 at RAI Amsterdam.

We're watching: European payment infrastructure (Wero, EuroPA, iDEAL migration), VAMP and the high-risk acquirer landscape, AI in payments, and PSD3 progress.

If you're attending and work in high-risk payments or acquiring — let's connect. Link in comments 👇

Most high-risk merchant account applications are declined not because of the business — but because of how the application is presented.

Underwriting is predictable. Acquirers assess the same five factors every time: legal structure, financial stability, business model, processing history, and risk controls.

Gaps in any of them are filled with unfavorable assumptions.

Full checklist on the blog — what to prepare across legal, financial, website compliance, and risk controls before you approach an acquirer.

Link in the comments 👇

Payment Myth of the Week — #5

"3D Secure hurts my conversion."

3DS1 did. 3DS2 doesn't — when implemented correctly.

In a well-configured setup, 85–95% of transactions go frictionless. The customer sees nothing. And a Visa case study shows 70% less cart abandonment vs the old protocol.

The merchants still avoiding 3DS to protect conversion are referring to a protocol retired in 2022.

Full breakdown on the blog — link in the comments 👇

Most merchants entering Europe assume credit cards are enough. They're not.

60%+ of EU e-commerce goes through local payment methods. 13% of shoppers abandon checkout if their preferred method isn't available.

iDEAL in the Netherlands. Pay Now in Germany. Bancontact in Belgium. BLIK in Poland. These aren't edge cases — they're the mainstream.

Full breakdown on the blog — link in the comments 👇

Most merchants never check their Merchant Category Code — but those four digits assigned at onboarding determine your interchange fees, chargeback monitoring thresholds, reserve requirements, and which acquirers will work with you.

And if your code is wrong — accidentally or deliberately — the consequences range from overpaying fees to account termination.

Full breakdown on the blog — link in the comments 👇

Payment Myth of the Week — #3

"Friendly fraud is just customers being dishonest."

Some of it is. Most of it isn't.

Friendly fraud has three distinct causes — unintentional (unrecognized descriptor, forgotten subscription), buyer's remorse (regret, difficult cancellation), and deliberate abuse. Each needs a different response.

Treating all of it as dishonesty means fighting cases you can't win and missing the disputes that were entirely preventable.

Full breakdown on the blog — link in the comments 👇

Local Preferences Series: France 🇫🇷

France is the largest e-commerce market in the EU — and one of the easiest to get wrong at checkout.

Over two-thirds of French card transactions route through Cartes Bancaires (CB), the domestic card network. Cards accepted through international schemes alone get lower authorization rates and more friction. BNPL has reached 66% consumer adoption. Wero is live with 16M users. And deferred debit — not credit — is the French norm.

Full breakdown of what a localized French checkout actually requires — link in the comments 👇

Most high-risk merchants accept their rolling reserve terms without question.

But the percentage, the holding period, and even the structure are all negotiable — most merchants just don't know it.

We broke down how rolling reserves actually work, what determines your terms, and how to push back at both onboarding and during the relationship.

Link in the comments 👇

Payment Myth of the Week — #1

"A low chargeback rate means I'm safe with my acquirer."

Not under VAMP it doesn't.

Since April 2025, Visa measures fraud alerts AND disputes combined — not chargebacks alone. A merchant with a clean dispute rate can still be flagged, fined, or terminated based on TC40 fraud alerts they never knew were being filed.

From April 2026, the threshold tightened further. And most acquirers enforce internal limits stricter than Visa's published numbers.

Full breakdown on the blog — link in the comments.

61% of EU card payments run on American networks. Most merchants don't think about it — until they have to.

Europe has been building its own payment infrastructure for a while now. In 2025 and 2026, it started moving at a pace worth paying attention to.

Wero: 50 million users, e-commerce live, iDEAL being replaced in the Netherlands by 2027.
EuroPA Alliance: 130 million users across 13 countries connected via a single interoperability hub.
Digital euro: legislation advancing, ECB targeting 2029 issuance if it passes.

None of this replaces Visa and Mastercard overnight. But the direction has changed — and merchants operating across EU markets should know what's being built.

Full breakdown on the MMG blog — link in the comments.

Most merchants who get de-risked never find out why.

It wasn't their fraud rate. It was the compliance cost of serving their industry — weighed against the revenue it generated.

We broke down the full picture: what de-risking actually is, why VAMP accelerated it, and what high-risk merchants can do to make themselves a harder account to justify removing.

Link in the comments 👇