Article summary
The CFPB has quietly excluded merchant cash advances from new small-business lending data rules, even as a pending Tenth Circuit rehearing over Colorado's usury caps and a New York consumer-law expansion push MCA oversight in the opposite direction.
Article content
The merchant cash advance industry doesn't have one clean regulatory story right now — it has two moving in opposite directions at once.
At the federal level, the CFPB has been quietly stepping back from oversight it staked out just a few years ago.
At the state and appellate court level, the trend runs the other way, with Colorado's usury fight and New York's consumer-protection expansion both narrowing the room MCA funders have to operate.
Here's where each of those threads stands.
The CFPB Steps Back From Calling MCAs "Credit" In 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took the position that merchant cash advances qualify as "credit" under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which would have subjected them to the same small-business lending data collection rules (Section 1071 of Dodd-Frank) as conventional loans.
That position has now been walked back.
As Goodwin's May 2026 alert details, the CFPB's amended Section 1071 rule expressly excludes MCAs from the data collection and reporting requirements — though the Bureau stopped short of declaring that MCAs are not credit, saying instead that further analysis is needed.
deBanked's coverage frames this as a meaningful retreat from the more aggressive federal posture MCA funders had been bracing for.