Former rating analysts at two of the major rating services told the Securities and Exchange Commission that problems with the rating system are due to management at the rating services, not the analysts in charge of assigning ratings.

Compensation for directors at each of the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks increased in 2012, continuing a trend begun in 2011 where a director’s earnings “started to show a wide range across the FHLBanks for similar positions,” according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Lewis Ranieri, one of the inventors of the non-agency mortgage-backed security, said there are currently a lack of viable alternatives to agency mortgages.

The Supreme Court will hear weigh in on fair lending laws and disparate impact in the case of Township of Mount Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, Inc.

The Supreme Court of the United States announced Monday, June 17, that it decided to grant the petition for certiorari in the disparate impact case of Township of Mount Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, Inc. Specifically, Mt. Holly challenges the position of the Department of Housing and Urban Development that disparate impact can be used to establish liability under the Fair Housing Act, even if there is no discriminatory intent. The CFPB, HUD and the Department of Justice have all previously gone on record as...

Bruce Schultz, head of mortgage operations for SpiritBank, offered attendees at the American Bankers Association’s regulatory compliance conference a useful acronym to remember a good strategy for navigating the rocks and shoals of the CFPB’s ability-to-repay/qualified mortgage rulemaking: CADI: Coordinate, Analyze, Decide, Implement. “First up is coordination,” Schultz told participants in a break-out session at the conference, held last week in Chicago. “Various people that you’re going to need to have input...

With consumer complaints being taken to levels near seen before by a regulatory authority – the CFPB – many lenders are quite anxious about getting their hands on them, resolving them as quickly as possible, and then diminishing the frequency of their occurrence in the future. But there’s more to complaints than that, some top compliance representatives said during last week’s regulatory compliance conference sponsored by the American Bankers Association. If viewed the right way, they can be quite instructive and...

Sometimes, industry “best practices” are as much what not to do as they are what in fact to do. That reality that is taking on a new degree of seriousness with the CFPB as the new sheriff in town when it comes to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and all of the new attention being paid to HMDA data. Maria Marquez, a manager for enterprise risk services at Deloitte & Touche LLP, told a group discussion during the American Bankers Association’s regulatory compliance conference that large banks are facing heightened...

Last week, at the American Bankers Association’s 2013 Regulatory Compliance Conference in Chicago, the folks at the BuckleySandler law firm circulated a checklist of the following 10 questions lenders should ask themselves before the examiner from the CFPB comes knocking on the door: 1. Do your board and management set an appropriate “tone at the top” concerning the importance of compliance?2. Do your board and management receive periodic reports on the state of your compliance program and compliance issues? 3. Do you have...

The American Bankers Association asked the CFPB for more detailed guidance on the “temporary qualified mortgage” for government-sponsored enterprise and agency mortgage loans. Earlier this year, the bureau proposed some amendments to its mortgage rules under the Real Estate Settlement and Procedures Act and the Truth in Lending Act. Among them are some proposed revised commentaries regarding the standards that a creditor must meet when relying upon a written guide or the automated underwriting system of one of the GSEs, the...