Mastercard

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Mastercard is an American multinational payment card services corporation, offering a range of payment transaction processing and other related-payment services.

Mastercard

Basic information
Founded	1966
Legal Structure	Public
Industry	Banking
Official website	https://www.mastercard.com/

Mastercard is an international corporation which operates a global financial network. Through this network, it facilitates electronic funds transfers (EFTs) using branded debit, credit and prepaid cards. As an intermediary between financial institutions and businesses, Mastercard supports payment processing by authorising, clearing and settling transactions.

Consumer-impact summary

Mastercard operates and maintains the MATCH database. The corporation's global outreach and market dominance allows to use this database to "blacklist" vendors that break their rules. The "rules" can be arbitrary, such as forbidding transactions that "may damage the goodwill of the Corporation or reflect negatively on the Marks."

What is MATCH

MATCH stands for Mastercard Alert to Control High-risk Merchants system. MATCH is Mastercard’s database of Terminated Merchant Files (TMFs) that contain information about accounts that have been closed by credit card processors around the world for high chargebacks or violations of card brand rules.

Payment operators such as Visa and Mastercard, operate databases known as Terminated Merchant Files (TMFs) that contain information about accounts that have been closed by credit card processors around the world for high chargebacks or violations of card brand rules.

All payment processors must check these databases when accepting a new user, and must also add merchants to the database if they close the account and it meets TMF criteria.

Being placed on a TMF can have serious effects. While they’re only supposed to be informational tools during the account application process, many entities refuse to accept businesses or individuals listed on a TMF. For this reason, it’s important to be aware of TMF criteria and make sure you avoid becoming eligible.

Consumer freedom limitations

Credit card processors using the MATCH system must submit vendors into the MATCH system that they end business with, as long as they meet the criteria. This results in the vendor not being able to accept payments using any banks or payment processors that are partnered with Mastercard or use the MATCH system, effectively "blacklisting" them from using the world's main payment processors which can result in financial collapse of the vendor, as well as subsequently preventing consumers from buying from the vendor using payment methods that are most common and accessible.

Incidents

Add one-paragraph summaries of incidents below in sub-sections, which link to each incident's main article while linking to the main article and including a short summary. It is acceptable to create an incident summary before the main page for an incident has been created. To link to the page use the "Hatnote" or "Main" templates.

If the company has numerous incidents then format them in a table (see Amazon for an example).

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This is a list of all consumer-protection incidents this company is involved in. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the Mastercard category.

Example incident one (date)

Main article: link to the main article

Short summary of the incident (could be the same as the summary preceding the article).

Example incident two (date)

...

Products

This is a list of the company's product lines with articles on this wiki.

• Example product line one (release date): Short summary of the product's incidents.
• Example product line two (release date):

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See also

Valve allows ISPs and payment processors to censor content on Steam