Card Scheme Rules

Visa and Mastercard's private rulebooks for gambling transactions — registration programs, country permissions, coding and dispute regimes.

Scheme rules govern card gambling above any single bank: high-risk registration (and its fees), where gambling card acceptance is permitted at all, transaction-coding integrity, dispute-rate thresholds and penalty programs.

Practical consequences

Scheme country-permission matrices explain oddities like markets where licensed operators still can’t take cards; scheme integrity sweeps drive the periodic gray-market processing purges; and scheme fine schedules are why acquirers police merchants preemptively. Operators don’t negotiate with schemes — they architect around them, which is what the APM and open-banking mix ultimately is.