The Mastercard MATCH list, which stands for Member Alert to Control High-Risk Merchants, is a database that payment processors and acquiring banks are required to check before approving a new merchant account application. When a processor terminates a merchant account for a qualifying reason, it is required to report the termination to Mastercard, which adds the merchant and its principals to the database. The qualifying reasons include excessive chargebacks, fraud, counterfeit transactions, illegal transactions, and violation of card network rules. Merchants are listed by business name and by the names and identification information of the principals, which means that a MATCH list placement can follow an individual business owner across multiple business entities.
MATCH list placement typically remains active for five years from the date of the termination that triggered the listing. During that period, any acquiring bank or processor that checks the list before approving a merchant account application will see the placement and can use it as grounds for refusal. In practice, most conventional processors decline MATCH list merchants as a matter of policy. The MATCH list was designed by Mastercard to function as an industry-wide alert system that prevents merchants who have violated card network rules from simply moving to a new processor and repeating the behavior. For merchants whose MATCH list placement resulted from factors partially outside their control, such as industry-level chargeback rates, the system functions as a long-term exclusion from conventional payment processing regardless of what has changed in the merchant's operations.
