Why UCC Dialing Used to Work
UCC-1 filings are public record, which is exactly why they became a foundational MCA lead source: a funder perfects a security interest in a merchant's assets, the filing becomes public, and any broker with a list-pulling tool can dial the named business without paying a data vendor a cent. That low cost of entry is what built an entire generation of shops around UCC dialing, and DailyFunder poster ryan$ concedes the model had real value at one point, framing his critique explicitly against "15 years ago," not against UCC filings as a concept.
What Changed: Filing Timing, Not the Filings Themselves
ryan$'s core argument is about when funders file, not whether UCCs are public. His post states directly: "Stop calling UCC's. UCCs are not what they were 15 years ago," and explains that MCA funders now mostly file a UCC only after a merchant has already defaulted, not at origination. That timing shift means an MCA-specific UCC list today skews toward merchants who are already distressed or have already been funded and are now in default, not toward fresh, fundable prospects the way it may have a decade and a half ago. His advice to other brokers is blunt: "buy AGED Submissions, Funded Deals, Declines, Web Leads or Live Transfers... literally any other lead offering is better than UCC's."
The Exception Even the Critics Carve Out
ryan$'s post is not a blanket dismissal of every UCC type. He explicitly carves out Bank UCCs and Equipment Finance and Leasing UCCs as still holding value, distinct from MCA-specific funder filings. That distinction matters for anyone still building a UCC-dialing operation in 2026: the critique is aimed at the specific behavior of MCA funders filing late, after default, not at the public-record UCC mechanism itself.
The Efficiency Argument: A Documented Commission Plateau
A second DailyFunder thread makes a related but distinct case against UCC-heavy operations, on labor economics rather than data quality. Poster Sean-nayyar argues that a UCC-dependent shop "will be extremely inefficient because you'll be pounding the phones 12 hours a day, which will inevitably lead to low employee morale, and lots of turnover." His stated ceiling: UCC-fueled shops plateau around $50,000 to $100,000 a month in commissions, because, in his words, "none of the big dogs are using UCC leads to scale beyond 100k a month."
Read together, ryan$ and Sean-nayyar are making two different but reinforcing points: the data quality on MCA-specific UCC lists has degraded, and even when the data is workable, the labor model built around dialing it caps how big a shop can get.
Where VA Horizon Fits
VA Horizon does not dial UCC lists, or any purchased list. We build the merchant list in-house to the revenue, time-in-business, and industry criteria you set, and Human + AI SDRs qualify each merchant over SMS, the way merchant owners already run the rest of their business from a phone. That sidesteps both of the problems described above: there is no already-defaulted UCC filing skewing the pool, and there is no 12-hour dial shift capping how the operation scales, since the model was never built around phone volume in the first place.
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.
- DailyFunder, "UCC lists" thread
- DailyFunder, "Why You Should Avoid UCC Leads Like The Plague" thread
- DailyFunder, "Please help - we need quality leads!" thread