In 2024, before most owners noticed, Georgia joined the states that require a funder to disclose the cost of a merchant cash advance in writing, in terms a reasonable owner can read, before the signature. The law arrived quietly and it does precisely what it says. The amount advanced, the finance charge, the rate expressed the way the statute prescribes: all of it printed, all of it handed over in advance. The owner now knows the price. That is the whole of what the law gives him, and it is not nothing, and it is not enough.
A disclosure names the cost. It does not cap the cost, and it does not stop the debit that the cost sets in motion every business morning. An owner can read, to the cent, that he agreed to repay one hundred forty for every hundred advanced, and the number does him no good at all on the day the account runs dry. Georgia wrote a label statute. It did not write a usury cap. They are different laws, and the legislature passed the first one.
The Price Is Local And The Court Is Not
Georgia keeps no confession-of-judgment tradition of its own, which sounds like a mercy and functions as a vacancy. Where a state has no rule, the contract supplies one. The merchant cash advance agreement names New York as the governing law and the chosen forum, so the dispute over a Georgia advance, debited from a Georgia account, secured against Georgia receivables, belongs by its own terms to a court in another state. The disclosure the funder printed was Georgia's. The courtroom the funder chose is not. A price tag sewn into a Georgia coat does not change the closet it hangs in.
I have made a version of this point about other states and it holds here without adjustment. A protection that informs is not a protection that prevents, and an informed owner is still an owner whose account is being emptied.
The Argument That Outranks The Disclosure
Underneath the disclosure sits the argument that actually moves a balance, and it predates every disclosure law in the country. The contract calls itself a purchase of future receivables, not a loan, and on that single word the price walks past the usury statute, because a purchase carries a factor rate where a loan would carry interest, and only interest is capped. A disclosure law does not settle the question; it discloses a factor rate without deciding whether that factor rate is interest wearing another name. Whether a court recharacterizes the purchase as a loan turns on conduct: whether the reconciliation clause adjusts remittance to receipts as written, whether the daily figure is fixed in fact, whether the funder bore any of the risk a real buyer of receivables would bear. (The funder will swear it purchased receivables and assumed the risk of their nonpayment; the fixed remittance, indifferent to a slow week, usually testifies against the oath.) When a court finds the purchase is a loan in substance, the usury statute returns, and a disclosed price becomes a disputed one.
The disclosure told the Georgia owner what the position cost. The recharacterization argument asks whether the funder was ever permitted to charge it.
The record that gives the argument its weight was made by regulators, not by disclosures. The New York Attorney General sued Yellowstone Capital and roughly two dozen related entities in 2024, alleging the advances were disguised usurious loans, and the matter resolved that December in a consented judgment of $1.065 billion, with about $534 million in merchant balances canceled outright. In February of that same year the Attorney General secured a judgment exceeding $77 million against Richmond Capital Group and Jonathan Braun for fraudulent conduct. Those judgments came from the courts the Georgia contracts choose. The disclosure law produced none of them.
A judgment against a business with an empty account is paper that costs money to enforce, and a funder weighs that arithmetic before it answers the phone, wherever the contract says the fight belongs. The firms ranked above are ranked on how clearly they work that arithmetic, and on whether an attorney stands near enough to the table to make the recharacterization argument credible. Georgia gave its owners a better-lit room in 2024. The walls did not move. For the Georgia owner reading a disclosure and still watching the debit clear, the first call is the one that costs nothing. It is also the one that starts the only conversation that changes the number.