PEP Episode 056 — The VAMP Revolution: How Visa’s New Rules Affect E-commerce | Sound Commerce Joins Us!

Big Changes Ahead: What Visa’s New VAMP Program Means for Merchants.

The payments world is bracing for a major shakeup—and many merchants might not be ready for what’s coming. In this eye-opening episode, Matthew Steinbrecher of Sound Commerce (https://sound-commerce.com/) joins us to unpack Visa’s new Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP), set to roll out on October 1st, and why it could impact nearly every corner of the payments ecosystem.

With over a decade in global payments, Matthew breaks down how VAMP will unify Visa’s separate monitoring programs into a single, streamlined system. But the biggest—and potentially most disruptive—change? Merchants will no longer be able to exclude proactive refunds from their chargeback ratios. For many, this has been a key tactic to stay under compliance thresholds.

As Christopher Dryden puts it, “Theoretically, based on what’s been published, that’s not going to happen any longer.” This seemingly small adjustment could have big consequences, especially for high-risk verticals like supplements, electronics, and other direct-to-consumer categories.
The discussion gets into real examples, including one disturbing case where a processor froze both incoming transactions and refund capabilities. The result? A self-fulfilling chargeback spiral—the merchant couldn’t resolve issues, leading to even more disputes.

Beyond the policy itself, we dive into what this all means in practice:

• What should merchants be doing now to prepare?
• Why is accurate, cross-platform data reporting more important than ever?
• And how can specialized payments ops teams help businesses stay ahead?

We also look at how acquirers and processors might respond—and the potential unintended ripple effects across the industry.

Whether you’re a merchant, ISO, acquirer, or payments professional, this episode delivers need-to-know insights and actionable advice. Don’t miss Matthew’s perspective on what smart players should be doing now to weather the VAMP storm.

Christopher Dryden (00:00):

Uh, you haven’t mentioned RDR, which is Oh, yeah. Yeah. There’s there, along with, um, these programs, there have been tools that have been available where if there is something like a, uh, a customer dissatisfaction with the product or this or that, there has been the ability for the merchant to go ahead and return the transaction so that that doesn’t get counted against them. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So that has traditionally been taken out because, look, I can return, I can see that potentially they didn’t, they didn’t wanna buy it or what they got wasn’t exactly what they thought. And I can suppress these, the rates, uh, on both of these through a returns process where I can proactively, as a merchant get in front of that dispute to charge back and get in and go, you know what? I’m gonna, I’m gonna make the decision on my own. Go ahead and do this. Return the product, don’t return the product. I’m gonna give you back your money. And that has actually helped because e-commerce is high volume. And so that’s, that’s helped them a lot.

Matthew Steinbrecher (01:04):

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. The

Christopher Dryden (01:05):

Interesting thing about vamp is that now when you say that they are going to just like combine everything, they’re also combining that return activity in there that used to suppress some of the data and the threat to keep certain merchants under the thresholds. That’s not gonna hap or theoretically based on what’s been published. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen any longer.

Jeremy Stock (01:28):

Welcome to the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of Global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode and today in studio joining us, Christopher Dryden, founding and managing partner of Global Legal Law Firm, as well as our special guest joining us remotely, Matthew Steinbrecher. Matthew, welcome to the podcast Matthew’s with Sound Commerce. This is gonna be a great conversation.

Matthew Steinbrecher (01:58):

Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me on, guys.

Christopher Dryden (02:00):

Yeah, for sure. Matt. So we’ve spoken in the past. We actually tried to do this podcast the other day and had technical difficulties, but so be it. Um, thanks for showing up again. Really appreciate it. Subject matter today is gonna be very interesting because it is very applicable to almost anybody and the payment processing ecosystem. Um, and I’m glad that you brought this up because I think it’s been, you know, the, the changes have been delayed until October 1st, but everybody’s getting ready because it’s gonna be a problem for a lot of people. And it’s gonna be a restriction on commerce for a lot of people talking about the vamp changes. But we’ll get to that. Um, you know, but more than anything, like the most important thing that I always, you know, like to talk about when we get on this is who’s Matt <laugh>? <laugh>? Like, like, Hey Matt, tell us about yourself. Tell us about sound commerce. Tell us about how you got into the industry. Um, I think those are always good backstories. It gives people context to what we’re gonna talk about, but also context about how, you know, how you get into this, you know, and, and, and kind of how, you know, how you can center in on, on one part of the industry and, and, you know, make a living for yourself.

Matthew Steinbrecher (03:13):

Yeah. Yeah, man. Um, I think, uh, so my background, I actually started, originally I studied in school, um, like macroeconomics and found foreign exchange to be super interesting. So I kind of started my career as like Wall Street Broker, traditional kind of foreign exchange broker specifically. And slowly got into the world of payments. ’cause uh, one of my cousins was basically working in global payments at the time. I think it was, uh, global Collect. And he was building another startup. Uh, and that was a company called Reach, which is basically a merchant of record. I got involved in that maybe about 10 years ago now, and really just built and scaled that company for a long time. And merchant of record is an interesting topic all on its own.

Christopher Dryden (04:01):

Well, it’s, it’s a bad word, right? It’s a, it’s a bad phrase. Like in the last, what, like two months with the ftc? Yeah. That wasn’t even in our country. But the FTC was very clear about merchant of record is maybe not the greatest term you should be using.

Matthew Steinbrecher (04:14):

Yeah, yeah. There’s, uh, there’s, there’s two or three players that have, uh, let’s just say very obviously done some fraudulent activity using the business model, uh, recently and the FTC found out, but it’s been kind of a misconstrued term for a really long time. ’cause it’s not well defined in visa’s localization rules. But long story short, we were a very legit one. Um, and so we built a, a business that was kind of focused towards like enterprise e-commerce specifically all card not present. Um, kind of e-comm online retail plus SaaS and any sort of digital goods. And so we were working in both the physical and digital world. That gave me a really, that with kind of my foreign exchange background gave me a really interesting take on both the merchant side. ’cause when you’re a merchant of record, like you’re reselling the product, you own the product liability, you have to act as a merchant would competently in that country, whether it’s selling restricted products, uh, shipping products somewhere that they shouldn’t, making sure you’re charging the right local sales tax.

Matthew Steinbrecher (05:15):

Uh, but then also you have all the compliance on the acquiring side and your K-Y-C-K-Y-B of who the underlying supplier of the good is and all that good stuff. So really unique business model that kind of gave me a scope into both sides of, uh, the merchant plus processing side. And then, uh, recently I’ve kind of, you know, I’ve been consulting for a few years and then really just earlier this year started to go full-time in sound commerce, which is focused around, you know, kind of a normal agent model, just helping people get mids, things like that. But the focus is really payment operations, which is, you know, working with merchants to figure out how do I run things compliantly, how do I deal with vamp? How do I deal with not getting on the match list program? How do I deal with, you know, looking at interchange optimization, actually looking at approval rate data. Um, and then just kind of managing the whole complexity of the payments ecosystem. I sort of come in as like a white glove service to just manage it for them. Um, so that’s been super successful so far. And, and a lot people really like it.

Christopher Dryden (06:19):

It’s needed. I, I will tell you this, this is an aside, but I, Bryce that does our match work does it really, really well. Very knowledgeable about match. There’s a lot of times that the match merchants that come to us, and in addition to match, they talk to us about other things. And these guys, you know, match is not a prohibition to processing. It’s just whether or not there’s the additional underwriting and whether somebody wants to take on a matched merchant for, you know, that particular, like, you know, whether or not they want to consider to, to approve them. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And if they have a relationship with upstream with the acquiring bank, but had some guys come through for Match and they brought in this like, and Bryce sends me questions and I, you know, I usually have my like, you know, little antenna on and I’m like aggregator, like vac, you know, and these guys brought something very interesting to me, which was they did, and their business is fully legit.

Christopher Dryden (07:19):

They do EIN registration. Now, I’m not saying I would ever need this or anything, but they do for merchants, EIN registration, um, labor law poster for your applicable state, right? I mean, like, they have all of these kind of like goods and services for newly formed businesses and they do it through mass mailer because they get the public filing information. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. These guys have a business, right? And one of the things that they bootstrap on in, in addition, um, are other services. And people will go into their checkout cart. And, you know, I, I can’t remember who it was, but the gateway was like NMI was one of the gateways, may have been Shopify for another one. I don’t really know, but they had all these failed transactions. And so I said, send me the data. ’cause I need to like look at it. I need to see the, the reasons usually that’s on the issuing side.

Christopher Dryden (08:13):

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Where the transaction’s just failing and the issuer’s probably blocking it for some reason. And like, I talked to them for like 20, 30 minutes, said, go back to NMI, ’cause they showed me the, the onscreen on the call, the portal results. And so I said, you know, these are really weird right here. Like it looks, and I don’t understand why people would be trying to commit fraud for your a hundred dollars checkout. Right? Like, I mean, what are they gonna do? Get an abundance of labor law posters for a bunch of different states and resell ’em. I’m like, you know, like, this makes zero sense to me. They went to NMI and literally NMI like changed two or three things on their site at the checkout level. And it went, all of it went away. And one of ’em was they were taking the wrong address. They were taking different, uh, address associated, not with the business, but with the person. They had something wrong in the checkout.

Matthew Steinbrecher (09:07):

Yep.

Christopher Dryden (09:08):

And it totally removed like 75% of the failed charges. And they wouldn’t have known that unless we had this conversation. But to have somebody who actually understands on the backend what happens in the transaction to do optimization, I think that white glove service like super important.

Matthew Steinbrecher (09:27):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s, um, it’s pretty critical, man. It’s because it’s confusing, you know, the world of payments is, it’s designed to be, it’s just, it’s just like I came from Wall Street. It’s designed to confuse you so they can make money off of you. Yeah. The problem is with failed payments, I mean, yeah, you can argue that they’re making money on API calls for like the authorization fee, but like, no one’s really actually making material money on that. So like, everyone kind of has an incentive for the transactions to go through, but no one knows how to look for it, dig into it, understand what’s going on. And so it’s been really interesting. I mean, like you said, sometimes we can have people’s approval rates jump up 10, 20% with one small change, and then you’re just dialing it in from there and optimizing and looking at the data and always refreshing and yeah. It’s, uh, it’s, it’s a powerful tool for sure. People, uh, people enjoy it.

Christopher Dryden (10:18):

No, I think I, like, uh, in all seriousness, I had not really had somebody pose this question to me. And when it came through, I kind of tried to just like, I asked like basic questions to just try to like, let ’em know, look, you could just be like doing some things that are really, really wrong. I don’t know what you’re doing. Yeah. But then when they showed it to me, I had never seen it. Right. I, I’d never seen. Um, and I, and it really, that’s the part of the job that I like, which is solving problems and tried to answer questions that at first blush, I don’t really know, but it was interesting. And, and they ended up solving it before. I said, look, I know some underwriting people, I’m gonna go ahead and shoot this off to them. And literally like the next day they got back to me and they said, no, no, no. NMI was super responsive to us all. We had to do, like the way that the, the checkout cart in certain respects was set up, caused most of it, you know, and I, but I found it super interesting ’cause I hadn’t really seen any of that, but I know that there’s just so many random things that happen that actually prevent transactions in some way. Either it’s after the fact, but I’d never seen it like this where there was like a barrier on the front end.

Matthew Steinbrecher (11:24):

Yeah,

Christopher Dryden (11:25):

Yeah.

Matthew Steinbrecher (11:25):

Yeah. It’s pretty crazy. More often than not, you’ll see quite a bit, you know, like pretty heavy, heavy portion of declines that happen on checkouts are just from really small things that either the merchant did wrong or, you know, obviously user error with customers or shoppers. But a lot of the times it’s just small misconfigurations that can be tweaked and then you’re off to the races.

Christopher Dryden (11:46):

So what do you, what do you see, because, you know, I like to talk to people about this. We get referrals from all over the place, so we see random things, but not everybody deals with the same merchant. Doesn’t, doesn’t deal a type of merchant. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Doesn’t deal with the same type of vertical. You know, I mean, there’s a lot of people that are doing processing for people that are in, you know what I’ll term, this is my term, ultra high risk, but not quite prohibited. Maybe restricted, but maybe not, you know, I mean, everybody’s, every bank’s a little bit different. But what are you seeing in the match space, you know, for, for your clients? Like where, where are you seeing problems for ’em? I mean, uh, like we’re gonna talk about excessive chargebacks. So I think maybe that’s a segue into that, but are you seeing anything outside of excessive chargebacks?

Matthew Steinbrecher (12:31):

Yeah, I’d say the two, A lot of, a lot of my client space is kind of in the Nutri Gadget. Some of that nutri is now, you know, a lot of peptides and other things that are more restricted are, are getting hot right now in the market on the consumer side in the us. Um, so that’s kind of been a lot of people are moving into that space, which is a little more restricted as, you know, on the payment side. Um, but traditional nutra, you know, like the multivitamin kind of thing as well, and break down ga

Christopher Dryden (12:57):

Break down gadget for people because that, that’s a term that you’ve gotta be in the industry to understand it. But tell people

Matthew Steinbrecher (13:02):

What, yeah. So I always tell people it’s like impulse buy crap that you don’t really need that you know, is like typically real cheaply made. You know, it’ll, it’ll work usually, but it’s some sort of gadget that you’ll use in your household or everyday life or whatever. So an example might be, uh, like a, a mosquitoes app, you know, a little blue UV light that sits in your house and kills mosquitoes, right? There’s tons of them on there. You can buy ’em on Amazon, you can buy ’em whenever. But like, they’ll throw some Instagram ad at you. You look at it, you’re like, oh yeah, I have mosquitoes in my backyard. I’ll buy this. And then boom, you know, you spend 40 bucks on mosquitoes app or, and then you get one in the mail that’s like a, an example of a gadget that’s like, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like a cheap little tchotchke.

Matthew Steinbrecher (13:46):

It’s not expensive to make. Um, but it usually has some sort of utility to you. Um, you know, stuff like that. Or maybe like a small space heater in your house or something like that. That’s just like a little tiny one. You can plug it right into the wall instead of buying like a, a larger space heater. That’s type typical examples of gadgets. Usually they’re very trendy or cyclical to, you know, um, weather, time of year, stuff like that. Like both of those obviously are meant for winter and, uh, summer when you have mosquitoes. So yeah, that would kind of be gadgets, just anything that’s <laugh>. Yeah. I just, I, I always call ’em like cheap little trinkets. It’s crap that you don’t really need, but you want. Um, so

Christopher Dryden (14:29):

That breaks, that breaks really fast. So causes, yeah. I was gonna say that,

Jeremy Stock (14:32):

Matt, you were being nice. You left out that part. Yeah. It works for two weeks. You used it again. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Matthew Steinbrecher (14:37):

I was like, you buy it, you plug it in, it doesn’t work. Yeah. Go ahead. Be, yeah.

Jeremy Stock (14:44):

When we were talking right before this podcast, you had an interesting story related to one, one of your merchants getting on match list. Maybe that might be a nice way to jump into this as well. Would you mind telling that situation?

Matthew Steinbrecher (14:57):

Yeah. So, um, I guess I answer the first part of the question. I do, the two most common things I see in my space are transaction laundering. Um, and then excessive chargebacks when it comes to match lists. So transaction laundering happens. ’cause a lot of the guys that get into this space and sell on e-comm with, you know, their gadgets or their nutra, they generally start as drop shippers. You know, they see some like guru on whatever and, you know, pay me 10 grand and I’ll teach you how to be the best drop shipper in the world.

Christopher Dryden (15:26):

I always think of that Asian guy on the boat with real estate.

Matthew Steinbrecher (15:29):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stop Tommy. You can make millions in real estate. Yeah. Yeah. That did, that guy made millions <laugh>. Yeah, dude. Yeah. So usually it’s those guys, you know, they buy some stupid training course sometimes. Some of the training guys are legit, I won’t lie. I know a lot of ’em, but, um, but most of ’em are, you know, it’s crap. They start as dropshippers. And when you’re drop shipping, like you don’t really care what the product is, it’s just whatever’s hot you’re using Google’s algorithm and meta is algorithm to figure out like, what are consumers buying right now? You steal other people’s advertisements, like it’s a super competitive and inundated industry. They’re all using the same manufacturers, so it’s all the same cheap crap that you’re sending. So they start in there, um, a lot of times they’ll, you know, they’ll have so many different products that they’re selling on a site, uh, and maybe like different URLs or different landing pages that sometimes it’s just by accident.

Matthew Steinbrecher (16:17):

They’ll add a new product to a site that is like an MCC code for Nutra, but it’s a gadget. And that product wasn’t previously approved on that URL by the acquirer or the processor that they’re using. And again, like harmless mistake, right? Like this’s, just someone that doesn’t know the industry, they don’t understand, well, I just threw a product on my website, it’s cool to sell it. Not quite, you gotta go through kind of an underwriting and compliance process a lot of times. So those guys who have match listed, that’s usually something that I find to be pretty easy to get off. And, you know, we’ll get into that. But the harder one, which is a good example to segue into is, is excessive chargebacks. And we’re seeing this more and more because it’s the easy button, I think for acquirers. Just be like, oh, yeah, you know, they slightly breached thresholds, boom, excessive.

Matthew Steinbrecher (17:05):

And one of the ones that I just saw, this was last week, and I get these quite commonly, uh, processor matched client, but how they got there was the mid was doing like maybe 500,000 a month in revenue. Nothing crazy. Um, pretty, pretty small overall. Definitely high risk selling gadgets, you know, high refund rate. But we had RDR we had ethica, everything was super dialed in. And so the actual chargeback rate, like the net chargeback rate was probably 0.4 5.5%. So, you know, relatively high, but you’re at 50 basis points. You’re, you’re in a, you’re in a relatively safe zone there as it relates to both vamp and you know, the old rules too. But the issue that happened is, uh, the processor basically shuts down the ability to do refunds on the mid. Yeah. So they shut down incoming transactions and they shut down refunds.

Matthew Steinbrecher (18:00):

They just completely freeze the mid freeze all money. And they just send us a notification and it’s like, Hey, your, your mids completely frozen. And I’m like, okay, well you’ve seen the data firstly, like, you know, the refund rate is really high. If we don’t refund these transactions, it’s bad for all of us because they blocked it before it hit scheme radar again per their numbers, which we’re wrong. Surprise <laugh>. And, and they basically block it. So now it’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy where you shut down mid because you think it’s high risk, and now all of a sudden it’s high risk because we can’t refund anything. Right? Yeah,

Christopher Dryden (18:37):

No, no, that’s the thing. It expon, but I don’t understand why there can’t be, like, if you shut down new sales, I don’t understand why there wouldn’t be a mitigation tool on the backside that would remain in place. I don’t see what the benefit is other than potentially it’s chargeback fees to eat up reserve funds that ultimately they’re just using that. Like I say this a lot to people and I have no proof of it. Like I’ve, you know, at times people question the things that we say on our podcast and send us nasty grams about the shit that we say. But I will say this is an opinion that with the full on assault on the profit margins at interchange, I just think that the card brands have created new profit centers and when they see how they perform, they didn’t necessarily originally consider it a profit center, but then they’re like, whoa, wow. You know, I mean, easy one for me, surcharge and cash discounting and kind of like this nebulous, uh, uh, rules-based system that doesn’t get proliferated out to people. Um, there’s so much confusion with anybody outselling related to these rules for, for a merchant’s place of business and the fine regime is just fucked up. It’s,

Matthew Steinbrecher (19:58):

Yeah.

Christopher Dryden (19:59):

And it’s different. If it’s a card holder, there’s a more severe fine, and if it’s a secret shopper employed by the card brands, it’s a little less severe or it accelerates or graduates at a different rate. But it’s still, they’re actively out there banging merchants that are like tight margin merchants anywhere from one to five to $25,000 on a first or second offense. And these are people that don’t even do $25,000 in a month necessarily.

Matthew Steinbrecher (20:31):

Yeah.

Christopher Dryden (20:31):

And it’s all because they’re signage isn’t improper. Right. Or I mean, we’re, we’re literally talking about a dollar 75 transaction with a 25 cents surcharge on it that ultimately it doesn’t sense. Like it should be about education, not just about enforcement. And there’s zero education and there’s a shitload of draconian enforcement and it looks like it just becomes a profit center. I kind of feel like they started to understand that, hey, we gave these guys this tool to suppress chargebacks, but when we have to shut it off, like when we really have to shut it off, like, Hey, here’s a way that we can get all of the reserve money potentially, right?

Matthew Steinbrecher (21:15):

Yeah.

Christopher Dryden (21:15):

You know, I mean, I don’t know.

Matthew Steinbrecher (21:18):

It’s like they know they don’t like the risk profile, so they’ll just kind of swallow it up and spit it out and then just eat through the reserves, you know? And it’s, it doesn’t surprise me, especially this was a case where, you know, we’re direct to processor, we’re direct to the bin, but when you have, you know, kind of these super ISOs on top of bin sponsor on top of, you know, when you get into the layer game too, it’s even worse. Because if you’re at the third layer and that’s who you’re signing a contract with and they’re taking, you know, responsibility like, you know, financial fiscal responsibility for the mid, and then they have a layer, and then they have a layer to the ultimate acquirer, it’s like they’re all gonna get a piece along the way when they shut this thing down. So they just have to figure out and weasel their way through who gets what, and then you’re paying even more, right?

Matthew Steinbrecher (22:02):

At least if you’re direct to acquirer with one of the big guys, which is hard to do in the high risk space and do it well and not be shut down immediately, you know, get match listed. But to do that well, uh, at a smaller merchant, you know, kind of individual basis where you don’t really have a book of business that you can lean on, let’s say, um, yeah. It’s just, it’s crazy. Like there’s, there’s so many fees that are just getting jacked up. And I think what’s wild is we’re seeing the throughput of applications seems to still happen, but the immediate shutdown of mids or, you know, just choke hold is dropped in the first, you know, two, three months of the lifecycle of the merchant account, even though the performance hasn’t changed from when it was originally underwritten. Dude, we have risk department calling some bullshit being like, oh, you know, this is happening now. And like refunds went up. It’s like, okay, we went from 4% to 4.2%, like that’s not a material increase for you to throw a flag. And they’re like, ah, well, you know, we’re shutting it down and then all of a sudden you got a quarter million dollars tied up in fees and <crosstalk>. But we get,

Christopher Dryden (23:04):

When we were getting on, we were talking about it like, you know, Stripe, perfect example. A merchant comes on, you disclose everything about the business, you disclose what you’re gonna sell, right? You go, you, you totally get approved. Everything’s there. Like, you know, they did the pro the, you know, the, the prostate exam on everyone, and then two or three months go by, nothing in the processing would reveal that there was a glitch or error in underwriting or an omission or anything, right? And still there’s all of a sudden, oh, wrist flagged you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I’ve seen this happen for years. I mean, it’s not, it’s like a, a competition between ease of access to the payment processing ecosystem to drive volume and then just suffocating it and, and either, and look, I’ll be kind here. Big organizations right hand, left hand, don’t necessarily talk to one another, have competing aims, need to actually show their value. Who knows, right? But all of a sudden there’s no anomaly, there’s nothing that would reflect a problem. And somebody that has dumped all their money into a business like this, it just get penalized. I don’t get it.

Matthew Steinbrecher (24:22):

Yeah. And what’s worse too is that like the, even people like Stripe who are, you know, so technology focused and implementing ai, like their implementation of actually recording chargeback metrics as per schemes mandate, like even just vamp aside, just, you know, the Visa fraud monitoring program, visa Dispute monitoring program, you know, MasterCard’s, ECP, like all those different programs, they’re not accurately reporting the data correctly. And they’re supposed to be getting stuff like TC 40 feeds from the schemes, but then their portals all have like inaccurate data. So you’re trying to reconcile between like what you get directly from Verify and Ithaca who are subsidiaries of the schemes and are basically your source of truth as best as it can be. Um, but then you have like your processor, like a Stripe who’s reporting your gross chargeback rate in their portal, and they’re like, oh yeah, you’re way over thresholds. And then they start, their risk team starts hammering down, and then you have to explain, no, this is how it works. Like this is the basic fundamentals of why I enroll in these scheme programs. And they’re just not, again, it’s right hand, left hand, right? They’re not really coordinating, which is crazy to me at the volume and size that they’re at. Um,

Christopher Dryden (25:37):

So for Stripe, I won’t comment, but I will say for like super ISOs, when the raw data hits them and gets into their system, I don’t know how they, their computing spits out. I mean, I think there’s money that gets made in there. And if you were to really get the raw access files, I mean, the problem is is that, you know, I, I see these demands like some idiot attorney and, and, and I hope he watches this, some idiot attorney in Louisiana that represents agents come to, came to our client who’s a sub ISO of, uh, uh, wholesale iso, right? And he is like, preserve all raw data, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m all, dude, if they fucking gave you the raw data, what could you actually do with it?

Matthew Steinbrecher (26:20):

Right?

Christopher Dryden (26:20):

Yeah. I mean, like, tell me what you’re loading that into, right? You know, like this guy, he has no idea what he is talking about. He is just listening to his clients. It’s like, okay, well yeah, sure. You know,

Matthew Steinbrecher (26:31):

Yeah.

Christopher Dryden (26:31):

Made me laugh. But look, I think what you just said is really important, and I’m gonna break it down in a little, a little easier, digestible fashion. Like the, the schemes are the card brands. You just call it a different thing than, than a lot of people might. But when he’s talking about these alert systems, they’re tied in, they’re subsidiaries of the card brands at this point. And so the data that they get is direct. And then you’ve got the processors slash super iso, whoever it is that’s getting also raw data, but the way that they integrate the data into their system, intentional or not, creates a difference between the raw data coming from the card brands so that there’s the dissonance that’s taking place. And now you’ve gotta go in and this is where the white glove, uh, service really comes in handy. But you were mentioning all the existing programs, which I think is really important.

Christopher Dryden (27:25):

Give people a breakdown because to launch into VM tell people today how it operates. Like, and, and, and it’s way better from an industry participant. ’cause you guys do this every day. I can sit there and tell you, but I don’t actually do it. So I think it’s much better to hear from, I always say the client’s the most important person because I don’t do your job. I know a lot about it, but I don’t necessarily do it. So I don’t function in it to be able to give an a perspective or insight because I’m not a direct user. Right? Yeah. But talk about how it operates today, the both the programs, some of the tools that, that massage the results of the program. And then we can roll into vamp, which I think is really like the core of our discussion.

Matthew Steinbrecher (28:16):

Yeah. So the, the programs as they used to be for Visa, so both card brands have their own programs. Uh, the primary card brands. So we’ll just pick on Visa and MasterCard, since they dominate the industry overall. They both kind of have programs, which is essentially like their policing tactic. Uh, ’cause the way it works is they will assign what we call principal membership basically to acquirers like big processors like a, you know, Stripe or some sort of bank, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, right? They’ll basically assign those guys these rules and say, you can board merchants, uh, but you have to basically make sure that they play by the rules. Um, so it’s, it’s really a set of guidelines because they’re not a legal body, but they are the regulator in their own network. So you kind of have to play by like the Visa MasterCard rules.

Matthew Steinbrecher (29:10):

So what we mean by these programs we’re talking about, um, and Vamp is like a new one that’s kind of combined a lot of things and has a lot of drama around it. But the way that Visa used to work and has had a program for, I don’t know, over a decade now, they kind of had what they consider a dispute monitoring program and then a fraud monitoring program. And they both, they have different applications. The dispute monitoring program is looking at how many chargebacks are you getting as a merchant. So you know, when you get a chargeback, you have a customer that calls in, they’re disgruntled ’cause they didn’t get their shipment, or they got a large instead of a small or whatever they call their bank, they’re pissed off and they, they issue a chargeback. How many of those are you getting every month?

Matthew Steinbrecher (29:51):

Um, and what is the amount of the, you know, the dollar amount of those chargebacks? They’re kind of looking at both of those metrics. And there’s certain thresholds that once you breach things like, um, a percentage of total transactions plus the number of chargebacks that you get, for example, if you breach 1% of total transactions, you have that month and a hundred chargebacks, you now basically get enrolled into their program. This would be their dispute monitoring program. And then you usually have a three month grace period to, let’s just say nicely get your shit together. And then, and then basically fine start ensuing. And the fines are usually brought down by Visa. But your processor, your super iso, basically the, the bank that you signed an agreement with to get a merchant account can also add fines on top of this. They’re not supposed to, but they do in practice all the time. So that’s how the old program used to work for dispute monitoring. That’s just with chargebacks. They also have like a fraud.

Christopher Dryden (30:51):

They can also negotiate down the fines.

Matthew Steinbrecher (30:54):

Yes, that too. That’s super important.

Christopher Dryden (30:56):

Yeah. Yeah. But that’s,

Matthew Steinbrecher (30:57):

Everything’s negotiable payments.

Christopher Dryden (30:58):

That’s a later, that’s a later act. Yeah. Sometimes after the resolution already happens downstream. Right? I mean it’s, it’s interesting. Yeah. It’s sort of like how doctors bill for personal injury and then take less money once the insurance money comes through.

Matthew Steinbrecher (31:12):

Yeah,

Christopher Dryden (31:12):

The same thing.

Matthew Steinbrecher (31:14):

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It’s, uh, yeah, basically assume that your first prices that you see for those penalties are not the last prices and everything’s negotiable. But you do have to kind of know what you’re talking about. You have to make a business case. You have to be clear. You gotta, you know, if a fine comes in, don’t refuse to pay it for months on end. Like pay it upfront, ask for refund later. You know, there’s a lot of little tricks you can do depending on the situation. ’cause it does very much so depend. But that’s your chargeback program. Then you have a fraud program. So this is something that’s a lot more complicated in terms of solving, which is why the new program that Visa is created is had a lot of controversy around it. The fraud program is consistent of what we call like a TC 40 alert.

Matthew Steinbrecher (31:58):

So if I’m a consumer and I buy something on my credit card, let’s say I don’t recognize the descriptor. So I look at my credit card statement, I’ve got some transaction for 120 bucks. I don’t remember, maybe the brand name and the URL were mismatched, so I don’t remember the brand of something that I bought, but it says the URL my descriptor. If I look at the URL, maybe I don’t. And I’m just like, I don’t recognize it. I may call my bank and tell the customer service agent, Hey, I don’t recognize this charge. Um, you know, what would be the next steps for a chargeback? And then they send you a whole thing of like, you know, send us this information. Would you like to dispute the charge? And kind of you go through a motion and depending on what issuing bank you have, they make it really easy.

Matthew Steinbrecher (32:39):

Or sometimes you have to jump through a little more hoops. But generally it’s pretty easy to dispute a charge. The moment that you make that call, that customer service rep on the issuing bank side, like, you know, capital One, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, whoever, they’re gonna mark that as a TC 40. So it’s called an early fraud warning, which, um, basically it’s not a chargeback or a dispute yet because the, the shopper is like, oh, maybe I’ll recognize it later. Or maybe it was my wife or something. Like, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll come back to you. I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna issue a dispute. Um, and a lot of times it’s, you know, inter inner family stuff too, right? Other people using shared cards is, is common use case for this. So that’s what we would call like an early fraud warning trigger, which doesn’t turn into a chargeback.

Matthew Steinbrecher (33:25):

Now, that is something that you wanna monitor because it shows you, like when I look at data, if I see a lot of those, and they don’t become chargebacks, something’s wrong with the descriptors, something’s wrong with the phone number. Your email confirmations are not going out to clients. There’s something that you’re doing that aren’t talking to your shoppers properly to let them know what’s going on. But basically these reports are monitored, like these, these alerts are, are monitored through the schemes like Visa, the card brand network. And if you have too many of these in any given month currently, and they become chargebacks again, you are now on a program and they can become, um, they come with fines. Yeah, I think it grace period,

Christopher Dryden (34:08):

I think it’s important to actually state like a dispute. It’s just a dispute. Like a chargeback is an actual resolved dispute, usually in the favor of the cardholder, which that’s a whole other podcast. But, you know, the, the dispute is one thing, and they’re monitoring both, which I think is really important that people understand. Like that’s what, that’s what you’re saying is, is that even when there’s an innocent, like, hey, everybody uses the same computer, Amazon’s just the account that’s on there. Lots of people in the household are like, look, dude, I’m not a, I’m not an e-commerce shopper, so I, I won’t pretend, but the amount of packages that come to my house, like Jesus, like, you know, I mean, there’s plenty. And the fact is, is that it’s very easy to go, that’s not what I thought I was ordering mm-hmm <affirmative>. And there, next thing you know, it’s just, uh, very easy to click a button and dispute the transaction.

Matthew Steinbrecher (35:04):

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Or, you know, maybe the charge is different from what you expected, or it’s, it’s really easy in banks because they give us, in the US in particular, they gave us all these rewards. You know, they want us to keep spending money on our credit cards, and they want to increase our lines of credit. So we go further and further into debt, we get all the, you know, cash back and travel points and all that crap. So the banks are always gonna side with us as consumers, um, which makes it a pain in the ass for the merchants to manage. But what’s really important, the distinction between these two programs is there’s an actual, and then there’s like a fraud fraudulent chargeback, which could be friendly fraud, which would be considered like a customer saying, I never ordered this, but they totally did.

Matthew Steinbrecher (35:48):

And they just had three glasses of wine after dinner on Friday night and forgot that they ordered it. And then boom, all of a sudden it shows up to their door three days later and they try to charge it back because they can’t get a refund for whatever reason the merchant’s refund policy, blah, blah, blah. So there’s all these things that kind of come into play. There’s hundreds of scenarios, um, that we’ve kind of outlined. But those two distinctive programs are different because they are slightly different use cases. But basically you’re looking at, you know, do you generally have high chargebacks and do you have high chargebacks that have a fraudulent reason code? And the fraudulent reason codes are really commonly used by the issuing banks because customers, again, they, they’re just like, oh, this isn’t what I thought it was. Like chargeback, it’s fraud. And now the merchant is having to,

Christopher Dryden (36:34):

They made it easy too, Matt. I mean, like, if I go on my online portal as a cardholder, there’s tools in there for me to dispute transactions to make it very easy these days because there is so much more, uh, e e-commerce activity. And there are these situations where fraud does exist, even like innocent fraud where there’s, you know, your card, your card information’s gotten, you know, in some way, shape or form just, you know, detected and taken and, and, but it’s very easy. All I gotta do is click a button, like, and then a little explanation, and they don’t make it hard anymore.

Matthew Steinbrecher (37:13):

Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, uh, that, that makes it increasingly difficult. ’cause there’s a lot of abuse from customers. And then there’s, there’s laziness from the customer service agents on the issuing side if it’s a phone call versus like an online portal dispute. And so it’s an easy button basically for everyone to just say, this is a fraudulent transaction. So what Visa’s done in a, a spectacular way, let’s say <laugh> over the last few months, is basically they combine these two programs. Uh, and there’s some other programs too, but these are the, the crux of it. And they combine these two programs. So now we’re looking at your actual chargeback rate, your TC 40, like what we would call fraudulent alerts. How many of those become chargebacks? Now they’re sort of encompassing and looking at the whole package instead of these individual metrics of, you know, kind of the healthier overall business as a merchant.

Christopher Dryden (38:08):

Again, again, let me say like, and, and, and you haven’t mentioned RDR, which is, oh yeah, there’s there, along with, um, these programs, there have been tools that have been available where if there is something like a, uh, a customer dissatisfaction with the product or this or that, there has been the ability for the merchant to go ahead and return the transaction so that that doesn’t get counted against them. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So that has traditionally been taken out because look, I can return, I can see that potentially they didn’t, they didn’t wanna buy it or what they got wasn’t exactly what they thought. And I can suppress these, the rates, uh, on both of these through a returns process where I can proactively, as a merchant get in front of that dispute to charge back and get in and go, you know what? I’m gonna, I’m gonna make the decision on my own. Go ahead and do this. Return the product, don’t return the product. I’m gonna give you back your money. And that has actually helped because e-commerce is high volume. And so that’s, that’s helped them a lot.

Matthew Steinbrecher (39:15):

Mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Christopher Dryden (39:16):

The interesting thing about vamp is that now when you say that they are going to just like combine everything, they’re also combining that return activity in there that used to suppress some of the data and the threat to keep certain merchants under the thresholds. That’s not gonna hap or theoretically based on what’s been published. Yeah. That’s not gonna happen any longer.

Matthew Steinbrecher (39:39):

Yeah. Yeah. They’re basically not gonna discount, they’re not gonna discount those proactive refunds anymore. And yeah, we’ll see if they change their mind. <laugh>, they’re basically saying that October is their deadline of when they’re gonna start enforcing. And they, their most recent publishers have said that they are keeping this final. But, um, for people that are not in the payments industry that might be listening, they’ve ping ponged a little bit back and forth based on industry pushback, um, from all across the board, not just large merchants, but actual acquirers who have to enforce the rules for them. Um, they received a ton of pushback. And where they kind of landed in this most recent one was that they were gonna look at this dispute report, the fraud report, these refund reports, kind of combine everything into a single calculation that would, uh, determine whether or not your business is high risk and should be on their radar, and then enforce fines in the same sort of schedule that they, they would normally, and again, those fines start at the card brand and then accelerate as, uh, you have more cooks in the kitchen, let’s say, to access the card brand with your processor and super ISOs and whatever.

Matthew Steinbrecher (40:52):

But, um, that’s kind of the way that they’ve done it. And one of the interesting things that they did, uh, probably because of everything going on with, you know, they had the DOJ witch hunt on their fees and things like that. They had a lot of spotlight in 2024 and early 25 on, on them as a, as a card brand. But they kind of encompassed MasterCard into this now as well, who had their own chargeback management process, um, you know, program, um, which was called ECP. And then that basically had a different calculation from what you did with Visa. So you had to look at your traffic split between Visa and MasterCard, and then calculate things differently to figure out, am I at risk of breaching any of these programs whereby maybe my processor shuts me down, I may be match listed, I may have higher reserves, I may have increased fees.

Matthew Steinbrecher (41:44):

All sorts of crap can happen if you breach these programs. So now all this is kind of getting jammed into one thing. And you know, for better or for worse, it’s shaken the industry quite significantly as it relates to like, you know, chargeback management and, and higher risk merchants specifically. Even lower risk merchants will definitely be impacted. Um, so we’re seeing that shake things up, but we haven’t quite seen it spill over into practice yet because they basically said, we’re gonna start enforcing this in October. So it gives everyone a few months of runway to do their own calculations, figure things out. It helps the acquirers clean up their book. But unfortunately, as part of them, you know, cleaning up their book for higher risk merchants, we’re seeing more people get match listed. We’re seeing mids get shut down. So, um, everyone’s sort of just tightening regulation, I would say, as much as possible until that date happens. And in the meantime, everyone’s enrolling to these refund programs, which are owned by Visa and MasterCard, and that is more bottom line profit to both of them as well. So it’s, uh, <laugh> again, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, prophecy of, uh, yeah,

Christopher Dryden (42:52):

Yeah.

Matthew Steinbrecher (42:52):

You know, we’re tightening up regulation, but you have to use our,

Christopher Dryden (42:55):

Use our tools,

Matthew Steinbrecher (42:56):

Maturity parameters.

Christopher Dryden (42:57):

Yeah, totally. No, no, no, I get it. Like, so, so I got a couple questions for you. Like, one, how, how are you guys, I mean, look, I kind of considered this a, a highlight of what Sound Commerce does. How are you guys gonna address this with your merchants? Like what, what kind of proactive measures are you taking to one, just notify ’em, you know, and educate ’em about, Hey, this is coming down the pipe, but how, how do you think that? Um, the second question is how do you think it’s gonna play out? But the first question is, is what are you guys doing?

Matthew Steinbrecher (43:32):

Yeah. So the way we kind of did it, uh, I always built everything based on previous scheme program rules. Uh, so like all these old programs, we kind of just went into disputes, fraud, whatever. I would build metrics and we have a dashboard that kind of shows you like, where do you sit in these programs month over month? And that just kind of allows us to have an internal heartbeat on each merchant account for our clients. Um, and then we can combat it with different tools. Like maybe, you know, again, it could be a descriptor issue, you got the wrong phone number, your email’s confusing, or whatever. There’s, there’s hundreds of things it could be. So we’re kind of diagnosing that in real time to figure out is there a way that we can fix this through better communication to customers or whatever it might be, better product quality, tons of different stuff.

Matthew Steinbrecher (44:18):

So that was kind of what we’ve been doing. And, um, I would say like earlier this year when vamp was flip flopping in, in the first quarter of the year, we also had all the tariff stuff going on. There was a lot of impact to merchants where it was just a bunch of super unknown things happening with external elements that kind of made them freak out if they were remotely high risk. And so what we started to do was build in following visa’s moving needle of, uh, you know, moving target of like what the actual vamp calculations would be. We now kind of built it before and after, so we’re able to look at here’s kind of your data with the current programs, uh, or previous programs, and then here’s the new program. And if there’s ways, all the, all the ways that you combat these program issues, like potentially, you know, flagged for fraud because your descriptor is confusing to your shoppers, those are things, those like diagnoses and then prescriptions to fix them.

Matthew Steinbrecher (45:14):

They’re all kind of the same. Now you’re just looking at the data in a different way because you see what’s impacting more. So you can kind of use the sliding scale to figure out like, okay, well if we can get our TC 40 alerts down, we’re gonna be fine on the vamp metrics. Um, but if we can’t, then, like we’re over thresholds and we’re gonna be in trouble, you know, come the end of the year and we’re gonna have some fines implied and potentially the mid shutdown. So we’re kind of doing that proactively as best we can. Again, assuming Visa doesn’t change their decision again, um, but we’re trying to do that as best as possible and then just implement all those best practices now before the fines start to kick in. Because I think that just what I’m seeing, everyone’s pretty uneasy about their portfolios, like the, the acquiring side, the processor side. And I think we’re gonna see some pretty fast and heavy enforcement with a lot of confusion and it’s gonna incur a ton of different fines. And I think the vendor side is gonna make a ton of money off this confusion and the merchants are gonna have to pony up to pay for it and let’s,

Christopher Dryden (46:17):

Yeah. I think it’s, dude, I think it’s crazy ’cause it the i the shit show that is high risk. Yeah. That’s what I would say where everybody just looks at the dollar signs and isn’t really concerned with anything else. Like if, if you actually value your merchant relationships, and these aren’t just IBO straw merchants or, you know mm-hmm <affirmative>. Like you’ve actually got people that are engaged trying to do high risk business in a legitimate way. Right. I definitely believe that they are going to be impacted, but I don’t, I I think they get lumped in, but it’s gonna be kind of crazy because there’s gonna be so much enforcement. I, I mean mm-hmm <affirmative>. All of a sudden at the acquiring level where, you know, there’s been an, an ability for the, you know, the DEFCON one to not take place all of a sudden how many Defcon ones are gonna be, I mean, there’s just gonna be a shitload of people that get shut off.

Christopher Dryden (47:14):

There’s gonna be a ton of volume against shut off. There’s gonna be a ton of residual that goes away, and it’s just gonna be really interesting to see what happens and how people respond to it. Like, I, like, I, when I, when I’ve, I’ve, you know, I’ve spoken to you once before and I found in talking to you that you’re, um, not a sales guy necessarily. Like you are building a system and you do business development with people mm-hmm <affirmative>. And when you do that, you’re looking at certain, um, industry actions that have a cause and effect and you’re doing it in a different way, which is great that we’re having this conversation because I like this to be educational for the public, and this is very educational of how this operates, what goes on. You know, we had a client that built an entire business that they sold for a great amount of money, all all based on this regime of return slash chargebacks, right?

Matthew Steinbrecher (48:09):

Yeah.

Christopher Dryden (48:10):

And I think it’s fascinating that this is gonna go into play and what’s really the driver of it. I mean, is it, I mean, there’s many, but I do believe that, uh, doing this is gonna require people to get a lot more knowledgeable or start to use software tools that they don’t use today. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Um, I will say that they, at least with, uh, with the alert agencies, like at least the price came down. ’cause the price used to just be ridiculous for the alert. I mean, it was, to me it seems cost prohibitive, but, you know, um, now it seems like it, it’s, you know, verify and think it’s a little, a little nicer on the, on the, the amount of money that they charge you per alert, but still like it’s, they’re making money handover fist.

Jeremy Stock (48:57):

Yeah. Because Can I pause it a question real

Christopher Dryden (48:58):

Quick? Yeah, of course.

Jeremy Stock (49:00):

So, ’cause I’m hearing you guys describe this, you know, coming vamp, uh, regime, what’s visa’s selling points? Like what, what are they saying? Which is why they’re doing this? I know they probably don’t even have to sell it

Christopher Dryden (49:13):

Selling point to who would Well, that’s be my question, right? Yeah. Because they don’t have to, right? I mean, this is, like Matt said this earlier, they’re not, they’re not a government actor. They’re a quasi-governmental actor because this is credit, right? I mean, you go into home loans, which is credit or mortgage, there’s laws all around that, whether it be state or federal. And again, this is one of those voids where Visa, MasterCard has not been directly reg regulated ever. There are some statutory frameworks that Visa MasterCard get bumped into and the, the attempted regulations happening at the state level, and it’s happening with energy like Illinois, Colorado, I mean, and then we’re gonna get this disparate, uh, treatment of what Visa MasterCard can and cannot do because there’s no fa federal standardization. And it’s gonna be really interesting to see what happens. It makes for a very gray and murky unforeseeable future.

Christopher Dryden (50:10):

And which is why I asked Matt the question of like, what are you guys doing? Because I can see the shit show that’s coming. Um, and I do think that it’s gonna be kind of crazy for a little bit. I do think it’s gonna be unclear. I do believe that Visa may have to ratchet back what it’s trying to do, um, if it can’t make up the revenue gap in these new tools that they’re gonna require people to use versus the all the other money that they were making through volume. I mean, we’ll see, right? It, it’s, it’s kind of a push pull, you know, the, the, the levers are gonna have to even out as to what it’s gonna look like. And that is a really huge macro discussion. But from a, the perspective of iso agent merchant, I think like Matt’s look at it, this is the information that they need to know and not, not really all that other stuff because this is what’s gonna impact them. It’s just what’s gonna be right in front of Yeah.

Matthew Steinbrecher (51:04):

You can’t, you can’t control the world <laugh>.

Christopher Dryden (51:07):

Yeah. I mean, or, or, or try to like figure out, you know, like, Jeremy, your question’s great for what we’re talking about because you’re like, well, how are they gonna sell it? They don’t have to sell it. They just have to do it. Yeah. And why they’re doing it isn’t really part of the discussion because the people that have to respond to it, they’re just gonna have, they’re just trying to figure out how to respond to it. Wow.

Matthew Steinbrecher (51:27):

Right. That’s it. And I think the people who made it happen also don’t know why exactly they’re doing it. So <laugh>

Christopher Dryden (51:33):

Maybe, you know, who knows that. But, but I, but I’ll tell you, I mean, it’s, it’s, these are the interesting discussions that I like and, but I think when we get too macro on people, we lose them. I think from, and I’m hoping that more merchants tune into what we do. ’cause a lot of what we do is really merchant focused. At the end of the day. They’re the ones that eat it, right? I mean, it, they, they have the hardest time in this regime of doing what they do and being able to keep it right. And there is so much favoritism to the card holder for, and you said rewards. I, I never even even go to that. I, I’m more along the lines of the volume of transactions. What percentage rate are they making on the card holders versus acquiring, right? I mean, they’re, that’s just a huge gap.

Christopher Dryden (52:22):

So, um, but yeah, I, I just find this really fascinating and every time you have something large like this, I, I mean, ’cause this is like, uh, you know, when like, you know, I’m a lawyer, I follow like big sweeping regulation changes in the law. There are so many unintended consequences that take place that you can be really smart. You can try to like, think through the mousetrap that you’re, you’re modifying, but at the end of the day, there’s just things that are gonna happen that you’d really never really contemplated and they have real world impact. And so it’s gonna be interesting to see how that goes down. And maybe, you know, after October we just do another podcast to figure out, you know, what, hey, what’s going on now? You know, I mean, it’ll probably be pretty good because I do think that Sound Commerce is trying to actively, um, get in front of it. And, and, and I, I appreciate how you are accessing tools and maybe trying to, you know, tell like, no, no, no, what we do is super important and it’s gonna become more and more important. And it’s not something that you’re geared up to do. Like, you’re not gonna be able to like really combat the learning curve to be able to do something like this, but it matters. And so, especially when you’re doing e-commerce business and it’s not brick and mortar, so

Jeremy Stock (53:45):

Yeah. Yeah. We’ll definitely have to have you back on Matt. For sure. Chris, something tells me that our phone’s gonna be ringing off the hook come October with people having to deal with what you guys are describing. Um,

Christopher Dryden (53:57):

Maybe, yeah, maybe. I mean, I, I think that they’re just gonna be like, in like, oh shit mode, maybe November.

Matthew Steinbrecher (54:03):

Yeah, sure.

Christopher Dryden (54:04):

Like, we’ll see. Like, well look, um, I think we’re coming up on a pretty, pretty, this has been, this has been great, Matt. I, I really appreciate you coming on. This is definitely information that people need to know. Um, but as we always do, I’m gonna give you the last word. How do you wanna lead us out?

Matthew Steinbrecher (54:23):

We’ll see <laugh>. That’s fair enough, man. Yeah, yeah man. We’ll, we’ll just have to wait and see. Just buckle up

Christopher Dryden (54:33):

For the ride. Hey, so, so that’s the other thing. Give people, uh, your information, sound commerce diseases, spell out your last name. Might be a little bit harder for people. How do they get ahold of you? Website contact information. Shoot.

Matthew Steinbrecher (54:48):

Yeah. Yeah, so, um, always LinkedIn is good. Matthew Steinbrecher, um, yeah, looks like, uh, Steinbrecher, but, uh, yeah, sound commerce.com is our URL. You can just pop in there and you can set a time with me directly and we’ll usually do a quick discovery, walk through your business and see if there’s a good fit. But, uh, yeah, happy to help. This stuff’s confusing, so we’re all about education and publishing as much, you know, detail as we can about all the complexities of payments. So always happy to reach out.

Christopher Dryden (55:19):

Awesome. Well thanks for being on, man. I really appreciate all the wisdom you’ve been spouting and giving people information out there that’s going to directly impact them. Thanks for coming on and sharing.

Jeremy Stock (55:29):

Matt. We’re getting all your information down below, uh, linked as well. So again, yeah. Thank you so much

Christopher Dryden (55:34):

Chris. And your cell phone, we flash your cell phone.

Jeremy Stock (55:36):

That’s it? Yeah. <laugh> <laugh>. Call between 10:00 PM and 4:00 AM for subscribe. 2:00 PM We get Matt’s social security numbers available as well. <laugh>, there we go. Talking great episode. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. Visit us online today at global legal law firm.com.