The Excessive Chargeback Program, or ECP, is Mastercard’s monitoring program for merchants whose dispute activity breaches the network’s thresholds. Merchants are tiered by severity, an excessive chargeback merchant tier and a high excessive tier above it, with escalating assessments the longer a merchant stays in the program and remediation plans required from the acquirer.
Why it matters
ECP is the Mastercard counterpart to what VAMP does on the Visa side, and together they define the ceiling on how much dispute activity any merchant can carry. The fines land on the acquirer first, which is exactly why acquirers act before thresholds are hit rather than after. Our deep dive on the Mastercard Excessive Chargeback Program breaks down the ECM and HECM thresholds, the basis point math and how to exit the program. A merchant approaching ECP territory should expect proactive contact, and a merchant already in it should treat the remediation plan as the account’s last chance, because for most acquirers it is. Where ECP escalates through fines and tiers, the newer Mastercard SMMP program skips the ladder and can stop acceptance outright once a scam is confirmed.