A Statistic Worth Learning From, for the Wrong Reasons
A specific claim circulates widely enough in MCA broker discussion to be worth naming directly: an 85% survival rate for merchants who take a single advance, dropping to 12% for merchants who take four or more. It sounds precise, and precision is exactly what makes a bad statistic persuasive. Traced back to its actual publisher, the claim comes from Velocity Business LLC, a paid MCA-defense advisory run by a self-identified non-attorney that sells paid consultations to merchants trying to get out from under existing advances.
That publisher has a direct commercial interest in making stacking look as dangerous as possible, since a frightening survival number is good marketing for a defense-consulting service. No case-selection methodology is disclosed anywhere behind the claim, and no independently verifiable underlying data supports it. This guide does not repeat that statistic as fact anywhere below. It is named here once, specifically, as a teaching example of exactly the numeracy failure the rest of this guide is about.
What a Disclosed Methodology Looks Like Instead
Set the Velocity claim next to CreditFeed’s own stacking research and the contrast is instructive. CreditFeed analyzed 40,447 MCA merchants across Florida, California, Colorado, and New York using a UCC-filing intelligence platform, and found 14.8% carry two or more active advances simultaneously, with 3.6% carrying three or more. Crucially, CreditFeed discloses its own bias directly: because MCA lenders do not consistently file UCC-3 terminations once an advance is paid off, the firm states plainly that these stacking rates likely represent an upper bound, not an exact current count.
That single disclosure, stated against the publisher’s own interest in a bigger, more alarming number, is the difference between a statistic worth using and one worth discarding. A publisher willing to name the specific way its own number might be wrong is behaving very differently from a publisher offering a suspiciously precise figure with no visible sample, no visible method, and an obvious commercial reason to make the number as dramatic as possible.
Why the Same Headline Number Can Mean Four Different Things
This numeracy problem is not limited to one rejected claim. Ask how big the MCA market is and the published answers do not agree with each other. One source puts the 2025 market at $19.65 billion. A separate source puts 2024 at $32.86 billion, growing to $84.97 billion by 2035. A third puts 2025 at $20.67 billion, growing to $41.81 billion by 2035. A fourth projects $50.2 billion for 2026. Those figures disagree by more than 2x for overlapping years, and none of the sources reporting them disclose a shared, verifiable methodology behind their number.
A reader who sees any single one of those figures quoted confidently has no way to know, from that figure alone, which of four incompatible measurement approaches produced it. The lesson generalizes directly to a vendor’s own performance claim: a number presented without its method attached is not more credible for sounding precise.
Sample Size and Timeframe: The Two Questions a Case Study Skips First
This is reasoning, not a cited statistic. A case study advertising a strong close rate or a strong ROI figure almost never states the two things that determine whether that number means anything: how many deals it is built from, and over what window of time. A close rate built from eight deals in a single unusually good month is a different kind of claim than one built from three hundred deals across a full year, even when both get presented as the identical percentage.
A cherry-picked window is the easiest way to make an ordinary result look exceptional without technically lying about anything. Before trusting a stated number, ask specifically how many deals it covers and over what period, the same two questions CreditFeed’s own disclosure above answers and Velocity’s claim never does.
What Lead Mix Can Hide Inside a Stated Close Rate or ROI
Published MCA lead pricing does not even agree with itself across vendors on what a single tier costs. One vendor quotes aged leads at one to five cents each. A separate vendor’s own published pricing page puts aged leads at $0.05 to $0.50 a record, roughly ten times higher at the low end. That kind of vendor-to-vendor disagreement on a single, commonly used tier is itself a small case study in why a headline number needs its definition attached before it can be trusted.
The same blending problem hides inside a stated close rate or ROI figure. A case study that blends cheap, high-volume aged leads with a smaller number of expensive, real-time exclusive leads, without disclosing the mix, is reporting a blended average that tells a reader almost nothing about what either tier delivers on its own. A close rate is only comparable to another close rate when both disclose what kind of lead they were built from.
The Number a Close Rate Case Study Almost Never Discloses
This is reasoning, not a cited statistic. A stated close rate implicitly claims credit for every deal counted inside it. What it rarely discloses is how many of those counted deals were later backdoored, quietly shopped to a competing shop without credit to the originating source, or resubmitted elsewhere after a decline. One DailyFunder poster, describing how routine this has become across the industry, put it bluntly: the days of an exclusive merchant are far gone, and backdooring is simply part of the space now.
A close rate that does not account for that circumvention risk is measuring something narrower than it appears to claim. It is worth asking any vendor publishing a close rate whether the figure is net of deals that left the funnel through a side door the case study never mentions.
A Short Checklist Before You Trust a Vendor’s Numbers
Practitioner guidance: before treating any vendor’s published result as decision-worthy, ask for the sample size behind it, the exact time window it covers, whether the lead mix or channel mix is disclosed, and who published the number and what their own commercial interest in it might be. A vendor willing to answer all four questions specifically, the way CreditFeed does with its own upper-bound caveat, is behaving very differently from a vendor offering a single dramatic percentage with nothing attached to it.
None of this means every impressive-sounding number is false. It means an impressive-sounding number with no disclosed method attached has not told you anything yet, no matter how precise it sounds.
What this means for you
- A widely circulated MCA survival statistic traces to Velocity Business LLC, a paid MCA-defense advisory with no disclosed methodology and no independently verifiable data, and should never be cited as fact.
- Published MCA market-size estimates range from $19.65 billion to $50.2 billion for overlapping years, disagreeing by more than 2x with no shared methodology disclosed, a real-world example of why a headline number needs its method attached.
- A vendor case study is only comparable to another when it discloses sample size, timeframe, lead mix, and whatever got quietly excluded, such as deals lost to backdooring, from the reported result.
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.
- CreditFeed, We Analyzed 40,000 MCA Merchants. Here’s How to Think About Targeting
- coinlaw.io, Merchant Cash Advance Industry Statistics
- Market Research Future, Merchant Cash Advance Market Report
- Precedence Research, Merchant Cash Advance Market
- worldmetrics.org, MCA Industry Statistics
- Synergy Direct Solution, MCA Live Transfers
- The Leads Warehouse, How Much Do MCA Leads Cost in 2026
- DailyFunder, Why do lenders feel the need of back door every deal we submit thread