Leveraging Merchant Category Codes (MCC) in Commercial Payments

What's Included?

These survey findings examine how organizations leverage MCC blocking to mitigate risk and optimize card controls as well as strategic approaches and practices around MCC in managing Commercial Payments. Based on responses from industry professionals, these results highlight current practices, confidence levels and opportunities for process improvements. Conducted in November 2024, the survey explores key trends, including the frequency of MCC reviews, the primary methods used and the need for enhanced automation and training.

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This report will help end-users more effectively:

Strengthen Risk Mitigation Strategies: Understand how peers use Merchant Category Codes (MCC) to restrict or allow transactions, helping refine your organization’s fraud prevention efforts.
Improve Oversight Processes: Benchmark your current MCC review practices against industry norms to identify gaps and opportunities for better automation, policy alignment and training.
Enhance Process Confidence: Learn how confident others are in their MCC strategies and what resources they need to increase control and compliance.

This report gives unbiased:

End-user insights
Benchmarking for frequency and method of MCC reviews
Recommended tools for improving MCC reviews

Key Findings

The primary methods for reviewing MCCs are manual analysis (42%), followed by ad-hoc reviews (38%).
Confidence is mixed: 39% are very confident and 44% are somewhat confident in their MCC process.
Eighty percent rely on manual review methods, with only 8% using automated systems.

Additional Resources

Creating MCC Profiles to Enhance Card Controls

List of Merchant Category Codes

IOCP Poll Results

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