Industry representatives who, since the 1990s, have been imagining a world of electronic mortgage transactions and related documentation took renewed inspiration from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s announcement this week of a pilot project aimed at using the latest in technology to diminish the “pain points” of the closing process. Brian Webster, the originations program manager for mortgage markets at the CFPB, said last week that the bureau had identified 1,480 such sore spots. But during a public forum held this week, the CFPB focused on a handful of primary problems it said consumers have with the way mortgage closings are handled in the American market. First, they feel...

Declaring this week that “inaction is simply not an option,” Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said that the Senate’s pending bipartisan housing finance reform bill represents “the single best chance” to overhaul the mortgage-finance market this decade. Speaking in New York at an event co-hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, Donovan said the Obama administration is squarely behind the legislative proposal by Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee Chairman Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Ranking Member Mike Crapo, R-ID. “Despite its imperfections, does...

The servicing rules implemented by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at the beginning of this year appear to have resulted in improvements to customer service along with increased costs for servicers, according to industry analysts. “Most servicers have adapted their operations to make the customer experience a key focus of their servicing operations,” according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. When reviewing servicers, S&P said...

The best bet for lenders that want to reward and retain their top mortgage producers while remaining on the right side of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s loan-originator compensation restrictions is to keep any compensation plan simple and easy to follow, experts warned during an Inside Mortgage Finance webinar this week. Some four months after the LO compensation rule took effect, most in the industry are aware of the rule’s general prohibition – no compensation based on loan terms – but lenders remain full of questions in determining how they can and cannot compensate their loan officers and brokers, as well as whom exactly in their employ falls within the new CFPB rule, according to Richard Andreano, practice leader at Ballard Spahr’s mortgage banking group. Andreano noted...

Sources tracking the bill’s progress believe that if those votes cannot be lined up in time, then next week’s markup could be delayed by a few days.

The bureau is expected to announce a pilot project to improve the mortgage closing process from A to Z for all stakeholders – not just consumers – an initiative likely to rely heavily on the industry’s technological capabilities.

In January, newly sworn-in FHFA Director Mel Watt officially delayed a GSE guaranty fee increase that had been scheduled by his predecessor Edward DeMarco.

Company Chief Executive Michael Lau noted that Pingora is taking in roughly $2.5 billion a month through “flow” arrangements.

The score card was the brainchild of former Acting FHFA director Edward DeMarco, who is retiring from the agency at the end of April.

As for details, a spokesman for the company said Ellie isn’t talking about the topic at this time. In an email exchange with IMFnews, mortgage technology consultant Tony Garritano of Progress in Lending called the whole episode “very bizarre”…