Cannabis businesses appear on the MATCH list at rates well above the general merchant population, and the reasons are partly structural rather than purely the result of individual merchant behavior. The legal ambiguity surrounding cannabis at the federal level means that conventional payment processors who do serve cannabis merchants often do so on fragile terms, with acceptable use policy language that allows rapid termination when the bank or processor's risk appetite changes. When these terminations are reported to Mastercard, the cannabis merchant's MATCH list entry reflects not just its own payment history but the instability of the conventional processing environment it was trying to operate within.
Chargeback rates contribute as well. Consumer cannabis retail is a relatively new category in most states, and customer disputes arising from product questions, delivery issues, and unfamiliarity with the purchasing process generate chargeback rates that can push cannabis merchants into monitoring program territory faster than merchants in more established retail categories. When a monitoring program escalates to account termination and MATCH list reporting, the cannabis dispensary finds itself excluded from conventional payment processing through a mechanism that was partly triggered by the novelty of the industry rather than by anything the merchant did wrong. 27 Blockchain's cannabis MATCH list payment processing solution is designed for precisely this situation.
