Mastercard Merchant Trust Services

Merchant Trust Services (MTS) is Mastercard’s enterprise-wide strategy to help identify and manage merchant risk across the payment ecosystem. It brings together Mastercard’s proprietary network insights, advanced technology, and external intelligence to better distinguish legitimate merchants from those that pose risk.

Mastercard Merchant Trust Services (MTS) is based on 3 core elements that make up the strategy. These include:

• A set of services for acquirers, payfacs, and issuers to address identifying good/fraud merchants
• A trust intelligence platform that derives a Trust Profile with scores and signals, leveraging Mastercard assets and added in best-in-class external assets
• A unified merchant registry with business entity data on all merchants operating on the Mastercard network

The offerings within Merchant Trust Services work to detect and identify high-risk and potentially fraudulent merchants earlier—from onboarding through ongoing activity—making it more difficult for bad actors to enter, hide, or re‑enter the payments ecosystem. It also helps legitimate businesses operate with less friction and reduced risk of being mistaken as an illegitimate merchant.

Merchant Trust Services is not a product or service —it is the strategy that encompasses current and future merchant risk solutions.

Merchant Trust Services aims to align Mastercard’s current merchant risk solutions with future innovation new services by, turning proprietary network and external signals into actionable merchant level insights that can be used to strengthen merchant onboarding decisions, enhance ongoing merchant monitoring and improve transaction monitoring across acquirer portfolios.

Mastercard has observed the above market changes and the impacts arising from the evolution and escalation of merchant fraud and is introducing MTS as a mechanism to intensify our efforts in combating this issue.

In today’s interconnected world, businesses and consumers engage in buying and selling. With a few clicks, a shopper in New York City can purchase goods or services from a small business owner in Singapore.

Scrappy entrepreneurs can set up shop anywhere thanks to AI enabling rapid creation of websites, and mobile POS systems.

Advanced technology like AI, have changed the risk landscape, creating new opportunities for financial crime, scams, and money laundering both online and in-person.

Merchant-perpetuated fraud has caused reputational harm for businesses, frustration for consumers, and billions of dollars lost across the ecosystem.

Though impacted in different ways and at different stages of the merchant lifecycle, acquirers, PayFacs, and issuers are on the frontline of merchant fraud.