The Filing Numbers Behind This Decision
TCPA class-action litigation is not a slow-moving trend line. Filings hit 507 in the first quarter of 2025 alone, up 112% year over year. By September 2025, year-to-date filings had reached 2,128, and September itself accounted for 224 of them, a 283% spike over September 2024. Roughly 80% of all TCPA suits filed today are class actions, and the average class settlement exceeds $6.6 million.
None of that is MCA-specific. It is industry-wide litigation data covering every category of high-volume commercial calling and texting. But a cold-calling, high-dial-volume business sits squarely inside the blast radius those numbers describe, and merchant cash advance is one of the most call-heavy categories in B2B outreach.
Why This Sits Closer to Home in MCA Than in Most B2B Categories
The MCA lead-generation stack runs almost entirely on the phone. UCC filings get pulled and dialed, live transfers get handed straight to a closer, and aged data gets worked call after call. One veteran broker on DailyFunder describes a UCC-dependent shop as spending twelve hours a day pounding the phones, a description that captures how thoroughly phone-based this entire industry’s lead generation is.
That volume culture is exactly the kind of program the filing surge above is climbing against. This industry’s own compliance stack, disclosure laws by state, TCPA-specific guidance for MCA shops, FTC enforcement history, DNC scrubbing practices, exists because regulators and plaintiffs’ attorneys have already identified high-volume commercial calling as a real target, not a hypothetical one.
What Human-Initiated Means at VA Horizon
VA Horizon’s MCA appointment-setting model runs through Human + AI SDRs, real people initiating individual SMS conversations with specific merchants, supported by AI, never a mass-blast automated system dialing or texting a purchased list without a person behind each exchange. That is a plain description of how the model works, not a legal conclusion about how any specific rule classifies any specific tool.
The technical mechanics of how manual, human-initiated contact is treated differently from automated dialing under TCPA are a separate, more detailed question, one our own compliance guides cover directly. This piece is about why we built the model this way in the first place, not a restatement of that sourced consent mechanics.
The Trade-Off We Chose on Purpose
This is reasoning, not a cited statistic. An autodialer buys speed: a system can place far more attempted contacts per hour than a person manually working a list one conversation at a time. That speed is exactly what a UCC-dependent, twelve-hour-a-day dialing shop is optimized around, and it is also exactly the profile the TCPA filing surge above is climbing against.
A human-initiated model gives up some of that raw volume. What it buys back is a lower-exposure posture on the fastest-growing litigation category touching this industry, plus a real, transcript-level record of what was said on each individual conversation, something more concrete than an assertion that a compliance process exists somewhere behind the outreach.
Why We Made This Call Before It Was Forced On Us
Practitioner reasoning, not a cited statistic: the easiest time to build a compliant program is before a filing surge like the one above forces the decision. Average class settlements above $6.6 million are not a number a growing ISO or funder wants to discover applies to their own program after the fact, and nearly 80% of TCPA suits being filed as class actions means the exposure compounds fast once a program lands on the wrong side of it.
Choosing a human-initiated model was not a reaction to a specific complaint or a specific lawsuit against us. It was a decision made with the filing trend already visible, on the assumption that the calling volume this sector runs on was going to keep drawing more scrutiny, not less.
What This Means for a Buyer Evaluating an Appointment-Setting Vendor
Practitioner guidance: ask any lead or appointment vendor directly how contact is initiated, a human working one conversation at a time, or a system dialing or texting automatically at scale. A vendor who cannot answer that question specifically is asking a buyer to accept a compliance risk profile the buyer has not assessed, which matters more this year than it did the last time that vendor relationship was reviewed.
The same discipline applies to any performance claim a vendor makes about their own results. A vendor’s case study is only as trustworthy as what it discloses about how contact happened in the first place, alongside what it discloses about sample size and timeframe.
Booking the Meeting Without Adding to the Filing Numbers
None of this is an argument against high-volume outreach in general, MCA runs on volume and always will. It is an argument for choosing which lever grows that volume: more automated dial attempts per hour, or more individual, human-managed conversations that each carry their own transcript and their own accountability.
Human + AI SDRs run every MCA conversation as an individual, human-initiated exchange, with the qualifying conversation logged, not a blind automated blast working a purchased list at scale.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Lexology, TCPA class actions continue to skyrocket
- Lexology, TCPA Class Actions Just Spiked 283%
- ActiveProspect, TCPA lawsuits explode in 2025
- DailyFunder, Why You Should Avoid UCC Leads Like The Plague