The Marketing-Audit Angle, Not the Full Law
California’s SB 362 took effect January 1, 2026, applying to commercial financing offers of $500,000 or less where the recipient business is principally directed or managed from California, and restricting “simple interest” language for non-annualized pricing plus rate or factor-rate figures that diverge significantly from the true APR. This site’s dedicated SB 362 explainer covers that scope test and both restrictions in full detail; this guide picks up from there and stays focused on one question an explainer of the law itself does not answer: what does an MCA broker have to go check across their own live marketing, and who enforces it against them specifically.
That is a genuinely different job than reading the statute. A broker can understand SB 362 completely and still not know which of their own ad headlines, email sequences, or landing-page phrases are the ones at risk, which is the gap this guide exists to close.
Where Enforcement Splits by License Status
Per MCA Directory’s coverage of the law, a licensed California Finance Law provider’s violations are treated as CFL violations directly, exposing the license itself to civil money penalties, suspension, and cease-and-desist orders. A broker operating outside CFL license scope is not exempt from the same restrictions; the identical conduct is instead treated as an unfair or deceptive act under California’s Consumer Financial Protection Law, which expands the Department of Financial Protection and Innovation’s own investigative and penalty authority.
The same source notes the DFPI “can and does initiate investigations based on merchant complaints,” which is the detail worth sitting with regardless of which enforcement track applies. A single dissatisfied merchant forwarding a screenshot of an ad or an email is a plausible starting point for a real investigation on either track.
The Ongoing, Offer-by-Offer APR Disclosure Duty
The part of SB 362 easiest to miss in a one-time compliance sweep is that the disclosure duty does not end once a website is rewritten. Per Monitor Daily’s legal analysis of the law, once a provider makes a specific financing offer, any subsequent communication that states a charge, a pricing metric, or a financing amount for that offer has to simultaneously disclose the Annual Percentage Rate, using the term “annual percentage rate” or “APR.”
That turns every post-offer conversation, a follow-up email, a text confirming terms, a call recapping numbers, into a regulated disclosure moment of its own, separate from the marketing page that generated the lead. A broker who fixes the website and stops there has closed only the first, and arguably smallest, part of the exposure.
Auditing Your Own Website, Ad Copy, and Email Templates
A compliance audit under SB 362 has to cover more ground than the homepage. Website copy is the obvious first stop: look for any page describing a factor rate, a fee, or pricing in isolation without an APR figure attached, and for any phrase describing non-annualized pricing as “simple interest.” Paid search and social ad headlines are next, since a short ad often compresses a pricing claim into exactly the kind of unqualified rate language the law targets, an “as low as 1.15 factor” headline with no room left for an APR disclosure in the character count.
Email and SMS templates deserve the same pass, particularly any automated sequence that fires after a specific offer has already been extended, since that is the moment the ongoing APR-disclosure duty described above attaches. A template built before January 1, 2026 was very likely written without that duty in mind at all, and is worth reviewing line by line rather than assumed to be fine.
What a Compliant Marketing Audit Still Doesn’t Solve
A compliant website and compliant email templates reduce exposure, but they do not answer the question a merchant asks out loud on a call: “but what’s the APR?” That is a live conversation problem, not a document problem, and it deserves treatment as a separate skill a broker’s team needs, not something a compliant landing page alone solves.
Human + AI SDRs are trained to keep every pre-offer conversation inside the same lines this audit is built around, no “simple interest” framing, no bare rate quote without context, so a broker is not relying on a compliant website to carry a conversation compliance has to hold too.
What this means for you
- SB 362 applies to commercial financing offers of $500,000 or less where the recipient business is principally directed or managed from California, effective January 1, 2026.
- The law restricts calling non-annualized pricing “simple interest” and restricts fee or factor rate language that diverges significantly from the true APR when either could reasonably mislead a reader.
- Once a specific offer is made, every later communication stating pricing for that offer has to disclose the APR too, an ongoing duty spanning the original marketing page and every follow-up email or call that follows it.
Sources
The external data in this guide 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.
- Monitor Daily, New Commercial Disclosure Law Obligations in California
- MCA Directory, California SB 362: The MCA Disclosure Rules That Took Effect in 2026