If you’ve just found out that your business has been placed on the MATCH List, you likely have a thousand questions running through your mind. Getting placed on the MATCH List is essentially being blacklisted as a small business and can have devastating consequences. Luckily, it doesn’t have to stay that way. There are ways to get off MATCH and move on from this nightmare. Keep reading to learn more about the MATCH List, how you may have been placed on it, what it means for your business, and how to get off MATCH once and for all.
MATCH stands for Member Alert to Control High-Risk Merchants and is a merchant blacklist previously known as the Terminated Merchant File (TMF). According to BankCardUSA, it was created by MasterCard, and it’s a central resource for acquiring banks, also known as merchant service providers, to flag businesses who have had merchant accounts closed for a variety of reasons, including excessive chargebacks, excessive fraud, PCI non-compliance, closing an account with a negative balance, illegal activity, or otherwise violating credit card processing agreements. Acquirers must be certified with MasterCard’s MATCH program before they can access the database to make risk-based decisions about boarding a new merchant or adding a merchant to it for one of thirteen reason codes.
As mentioned, businesses get placed on the MATCH List due to at least one of the thirteen reason codes. Some of these reason codes can be broken at no fault of your own. However, there are ways to prove that you have remedied the rule breakage to get off of MATCH.
The thirteen reason codes are as follows, according to Mastercard themselves:
When you have been placed on the MATCH List, it can have devastating consequences. This is because you will not age out of the MATCH List for five years. Businesses are kept on the MATCH list for five years before the records are removed, and they can only be removed from the list within five years by the same financial institution that added them.
This means that, for five years, you can not process credit card payments or have a merchant account unless you find a processor who is willing to work with high-risk businesses. However, these processors often charge exorbitant fees and have long contracts that are very difficult to get out of should you be removed early from MATCH.
The MATCH List is a comprehensive database. This is done to protect the banks and processors and avoid loopholes. Opening a new business under a different name, starting a new website, or somehow trying to find a way around being on The MATCH List is impossible by design. This is due to the large amount of personal information that is placed on the MATCH List. Some of this information includes:
Your business will age out of the MATCH List in five years, which will allow you to resume business as usual with your merchant account as if nothing ever happened. However, five years is an unreasonably long time for many people to wait. This period of time can have devastating consequences. As such, seeking early removal is highly recommended.
There are many ways to seek early removal from the MATCH List. First and foremost, reach out to the entity that placed you on the MATCH List. See if there is a way you can resolve the issue and ask for removal. Unfortunately, is highly unlikely.
Another way to seek early removal from the MATCH List is to get professional help, such as the Law Offices of Theodore Monroe.
If you have found yourself on the Match List, we can help you. The Law Offices of Theodore Monroe focuses on litigation and counseling in the areas of payments, credit card processing, e-commerce, direct response marketing, and Federal Trade Commission enforcement. Last year the firm got 100% of the people who came to us off the MATCH list.
Theodore F. Monroe, Founder of TFM Law, has successfully:
Before opening his firm, Mr. Monroe practiced law with Crosby, Heafey, Roach & May (now Reed Smith LLP) and Lewis, D’Amato, Brisbois & Bisgaard (now Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard & Smith), where he defended numerous accounting and law firms in professional liability actions, and insurance carriers in bad faith actions.
Before becoming a lawyer, Mr. Monroe worked as a forensic accountant at Coopers & Lybrand, which provided him with a background in forensic accounting and financial analysis that is unique among litigators in Los Angeles. Mr. Monroe studied at Duke University Law School, achieved a BS with Honors, Accounting, the University of Kentucky, and is a member of the California State Bar and the Kentucky State Bar.