Tobacco and vape merchant account terminations that result in MATCH list placement are increasingly driven by policy decisions at the financial institution level rather than by individual merchant performance issues. Acquiring banks and their corporate parents have adopted environmental, social, and governance frameworks that classify tobacco and nicotine products as categories the institution does not want to support, leading to categorical withdrawal of processing services from the tobacco and vaping market. Processors whose acquiring bank relationships change or whose own corporate governance frameworks evolve may terminate existing tobacco and vape merchant accounts not because the merchant's chargeback rates or fraud history warranted termination but because the processor's willingness to serve the category has changed. These policy-driven terminations can qualify for MATCH list reporting depending on how the processor documents the termination reason.
Vaping businesses face an additional termination driver in the rapidly evolving regulatory environment around vaping products. Processors that have used regulatory uncertainty as a basis for declining or terminating vaping merchant accounts have justified those decisions on the grounds that the compliance exposure of serving a category under active regulatory scrutiny outweighs the commercial relationship. As those regulatory developments have accelerated in some states and at the federal level, the number of processors willing to serve vaping merchants has decreased. When vaping merchant accounts are terminated in this environment and MATCH list reports are filed, the vaping merchant's ability to find replacement conventional processing becomes extremely limited. 27 Blockchain's tobacco and vape MATCH list payment processing does not require the merchant's business category to be acceptable to any conventional financial institution.
