Blog
How this market actually works.
Written for brokers and ISOs who have bought a bad list before.
News & regulationFundamentalsBuying leadsComplianceSelling and scriptsUnderwriting and placementRunning your floorGenerating your ownBenchmarks and data
News & regulation
Fundamentals
- MCA vs term loan vs line of credit
- What is a UCC-1 filing, and why brokers care
- What is stacking, and why funders care so much
- What is a factor rate, and how does it differ from APR?
- What is an ISO in merchant cash advance?
- What are MCA leads?
- UCC lists, aged data and live transfers explained
- MCA vs invoice factoring
- MCA vs an SBA loan, honestly
- Reverse consolidation, explained plainly
- MCA vs revenue-based financing
- How syndication works
- What happens when an advance defaults
- Which states publish UCC data free
- Why some UCC filings name an agent instead of the funder
Buying leads
- Exclusive vs shared vs aged MCA leads
- How much do MCA leads cost?
- How to compare MCA lead providers
- How to tell if your leads are being resold
- Buying MCA leads vs running your own Meta ads
- Twelve questions before you sign a lead agreement
- How to run a lead vendor test properly
- What "real time" actually means in a lead contract
- Why cheap leads cost more per funded deal
- Lead replacement policies: fair, and dodge
- Web leads vs live transfers
- What should actually be in the payload
- Tracking which leads actually funded
- When aged leads are actually worth buying
- Pacing: the setting most brokers never touch
- Why nobody serious sells leads on revenue share
- Spotting a vendor who is reselling somebody else’s leads
- How to check whether a lead vendor is legitimate
- “Validated” is not verified: ask the vendor which it is
- They filled out four forms. You’re the fifth broker calling.
- UCC data wins on price per record and loses everywhere else
- Buying the list is the cheapest part of a UCC deal
- Every MCA lead is paid for twice: in money or in time
- Start with $1,000 of aged leads, then climb the ladder
- A $200 MCA lead can still be resold to ten other brokers
- The best MCA leads in 2026
- How to buy MCA leads in 2026
Compliance
- TCPA and MCA leads: what brokers actually need to ask
- What consent language actually protects you
- Litigator scrubbing, and whether your vendor does it
- Do-not-call rules when the number is a business
- Texting merchants: what SMS consent requires
- CAN-SPAM for brokers, in six rules
- A TCPA demand letter just arrived
- The state mini-TCPA laws that actually bite
- Building suppression that actually works
- Calling windows, and the mistake floors make when they scale
- Recording calls across state lines
- Buying from an aggregator: the compliance questions
- A compliance audit you can run in an afternoon
Selling and scripts
- The first thirty seconds of the call
- Handling "I am not interested"
- Handling "what is the rate?" on the first call
- Getting the bank statements without losing the merchant
- The follow-up cadence that actually works
- When another broker has a cheaper offer
- Handling "just send me an email"
- How to run the discovery call
- When the merchant is already stacked
- The voicemail that gets called back
- Getting the signature the same day
- The merchant who has been burned before
- Text first, then call: what the merchant actually sees
- A 215 number calling Texas is a spam call
Underwriting and placement
- Reading a merchant’s bank statements in ten minutes
- Paper grades A to D, and what actually separates them
- Stips: what funders ask for and why
- Placing a file with the right funder
- Restricted industries, and who funds them anyway
- How many positions is too many
- Negative days, and what they actually signal
- Resizing the ask so it funds
- What happens after you hit submit
- What a good funder relationship is worth
- Second position deals, done properly
- How to check if a merchant already has an advance
- Counting a merchant’s existing positions
Running your floor
- How to package an MCA file
- CRM setup for MCA brokers: routing leads so they get called
- Building an MCA sales floor
- MCA underwriting: what funders actually look at
- Why MCA deals get declined
- Renewals: the deals most brokers leave on the table
- Qualifying an MCA lead on the first call
- MCA broker commission, and whether buying leads still pays
- Speed to lead: why 14 hours kills an order
- How many leads one rep can actually work
- Paying MCA reps so the right things happen
- The seven numbers to look at every week
- The follow-up nobody does
- Choosing a dialler
- Hiring your first rep
- Running a remote sales floor
- The tech stack a broker actually needs
- Four reasons MCA leads don’t pick up, and which one is yours
- A missed callback should get a text within seconds
- A lead nobody touched in five minutes goes to the next rep
- A half-finished application is not a lost lead
- Time to first dial by rep: when “the leads are bad” is one rep
- A real-time lead called an hour later is an aged lead at full price
- Stop blaming the dialler. A low pickup rate is who you’re calling
Generating your own
- Running Meta ads for funding leads
- The funding application page
- Cold email that is legal and actually works
- Google Ads for merchant cash advance
- SEO for a broker site, honestly
- Retargeting the merchants who abandoned the form
- Referral partnerships that actually produce
- What $10,000 a month of ad spend actually buys
- Keeping the creative pipeline running
- LinkedIn for brokers: what it is and is not for
- Six ad angles for MCA, and why you run all of them
- Good friction and bad friction on a funding form
- Microsoft Clarity on a funding page
- Never send a disqualified lead back to Meta
- When to send funded deals back to Meta as offline events
- What a good CPM looks like for MCA Meta ads
- Link click-through rate on MCA ads: 2.5 to 3%
- Landing page conversion rate: 5% of visitors into qualified leads
- A qualified Meta lead for MCA costs $15 to $30
- What goes in an MCA ad, and what stays out
- Write to the merchant’s situation, not their demographic
- The same offer, and the same numbers, from the ad to the call
- The picture in an MCA ad picks the industry
- Three ads with 250 qualified leads each, and three to avoid
- Meta will put 90% of the spend on one ad. Leave it.
- Found a winning ad? Make ten of it
- Why the big lenders’ ads work for them and not for you
- Raise the bar on what you send back to Meta
- Setting up the Meta pixel for a funding funnel
- Why the lead is sent to Meta twice
- Hashed data, and why the Conversions API needs it
- One pixel per offer, or it stops knowing what a lead is
- The minimum Meta budget, and why it is $100 a day
- The bank statement upload was costing good merchants
- At $100 a day, run ten to fifteen creatives, not fifty
- What you send Meta decides the next seven to ten days of leads
- Find the step where merchants leave the form
- Why a Meta campaign that worked stops working
- At $100 a day, leaving the learning phase takes a $15 lead
- A frequency over two means the audience is burning out
- A UCC list knows a name, a number and an old filing
Benchmarks and data
- Conversion benchmarks, stage by stage
- Cost per funded deal, and the ceiling you should set
- How long a deal takes, lead to funded
- What brokers actually earn per deal
- What each lead type costs on the open market
- Average deal size, and why the industry mix decides it
- Decline rates, and what yours is telling you
- What $18,452.78 of Meta spend bought in seven days
- The revenue in your ad is double what will submit
- The six Meta Ads Manager numbers that matter for MCA
- Lead-to-submission rate: 15%, and the range that still works
- The return calculation: $1,500 to fund a $60,000 deal is 4x
- What 767 qualified Meta leads looked like in one week
- Time and effort per funded deal is the number nobody asks about
- $1,000 in Meta ads, 30 leads, two funded deals
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— Alex