PCI Merchant Levels Cleared or Confused?

Branden Williams writes that Visa and MasterCard have pulled the "reciprocity" from their merchant level definitions (see here). For those of you not up on all the details, I'll try and explain what's going on.Let's say you have 1 million Visa transactions a year and 500,000 (non-ecommerce) MasterCards (Visa is the larger brand, so this ratio is reasonable). According to Visa you would be a Level 2, and according to MasterCard you would be a Level 4. So far, so good. However, this is where the "reciprocity" part kicks in. Reciprocity meant that if one brand rated you as a higher merchant level, you would be that higher merchant level for other brands, too. In our case above, while you were a Level 2 (Visa) and a Level 4 (MasterCard) based solely on your card activity, with reciprocity you would be a Level 2 for both brands.Now in the past the different merchant levels didn't matter a lot since you would pick your SAQ, do your quarterly scans, and that was it for merchant levels. No big deal...until a few months ago, that is. As I described in a previous blog post, the game changed this summer when MasterCard announced Level 2 merchants would be (continue reading...)