Almost one in five mortgage lenders in the country is still actively considering switching to a new loan origination platform, driven largely by the need to keep up with increasing regulation and, to a lesser extent, the desire for new features to gain or keep a competitive edge in the marketplace. According to the seventh annual compliance survey by QuestSoft, a provider of mortgage compliance software based in Laguna Hills, CA, 18.6 percent of lenders are reevaluating their current LOS platform, up from 0.1 percent in last year’s survey. Historically, the percentage of lenders considering an LOS change hovered...

For years, Union Bank of San Francisco has made a name for itself as a top-ranked portfolio lender of jumbo mortgages – but all that could soon change. No, Union Bank isn’t leaving the space – not by a long shot – but the $94 billion asset commercial bank is in the midst of making a major push into conventional lending where its footprint has been quite small. “It’s...

Most companies reported declining earnings from their mortgage banking businesses during the first quarter of 2013, according to a new analysis by Inside Mortgage Trends. As a group, however, the 23 diverse businesses included in the round-up posted a surprising 34.2 percent increase in aggregate mortgage banking earnings compared to the fourth quarter. The aggregate mortgage banking income was $6.74 billion for the group, a $1.72 billion increase over the previous quarter. Virtually all of that increase could be attributed to one company, Bank of America, which bounced back from a $540 million net loss during the fourth quarter to a $1.26 billion profit in early 2013 – a $1.80 billion turnaround. BofA took...[Includes one data chart]

Freddie Mac is getting the word out early that it is phasing out its software for managing delinquent home loans with plans to discontinue the service altogether next year. The company has already stopped registering new customers for EarlyIndicator, Freddie’s Windows-based program used to predict loan delinquency. "To provide users with time to transition, we are letting them know we are retiring EarlyIndicator one year in advance,” Freddie said in its announcement earlier this month.

One week after UBS Americas failed in its bid to shutter a lawsuit brought by the Federal Housing Finance Agency in connection with non-agency mortgage-backed securities purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal judge overseeing the case has ordered UBS to hand over internal documents to the FHFA the company argued were privileged. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote ruled last week that parts of memoranda from UBS’ outside counsel to the company which contained factual summaries of meetings held with third-party mortgage originators are not protected by attorney-client privilege and must be disclosed to the FHFA. “Even if it is true, as UBS argues, that the memoranda at issue were created for the ‘predominant purpose’ of rendering legal advice, that does not relieve UBS of the obligation to show that the entirety of each document is privileged,” wrote Judge Cote in her ruling.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced the appointment of a long-time staffer to oversee the FHFA’s supervision of the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks. Fred Graham, most recently the FHFA’s acting deputy director of the Division of Supervision Policy and Support, immediately assumed his new responsibilities as the agency’s deputy director of the Division of the Federal Home Loan Bank Regulation following the FHFA’s announcement earlier this month.

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati says a unit of Lehman Brothers Holdings is not entitled to a multimillion dollar payday because the FHLBank did not short change the firm when it closed out swaps and options transactions ahead of Lehman’s 2008 bankruptcy. Last week, Lehman filed a breach of contract lawsuit in Manhattan federal court connected to 87 derivative transactions or interest-rate swaps with the FHLBank that fell apart when Lehman entered bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008, at the height of the financial crisis.According to its lawsuit, Lehman says the Cincinnati Bank violated its agreement by paying only $13.7 million when the transactions were terminated due to the firm’s Chapter 11 filing.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is soliciting comments from the public on how its regulations may be “more effective and less burdensome.” The FHFA’s call for comments in a April 19 publication of the Federal Register is in keeping with a 2011 executive order that calls for each independent regulatory agency, including the FHFA, to analyze its existing regulations and “modify, streamline, expand or repeal them,” as well as to make public a plan to periodically review its “existing significant regulations” to make the agency’s regulatory program “more effective or less burdensome” in achieving regulatory objectives.

The Inspector General of the Federal Housing Finance Agency told senators last week that the FHFA still doesn’t have enough examiners, in his opinion, to sufficiently regulate the GSEs, while the Finance Agency head noted that the FHFA has added more than 200 staffers since 2008, with just a bit more hiring planned. Testifying before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, FHFA IG Steve Linick said that the Finance Agency is making progress on a number of fronts, including GSE assets and implementing the OIG’s audit and evaluation recommendations. However, following a 2011 OIG report which identified “shortfalls” in the FHFA’s examination coverage due to examiner shortages, the FHFA has made progress by “reorganizing the examination function and hiring new staff [but] it is not clear that the FHFA has achieved adequate resources.”

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s recent extension of the Home Affordable Refinance Program has “significantly lessened” the already slim prospects of any so-called HARP 3.0 legislation advancing through Congress, say analysts. The Responsible Homeowner Refinancing Act of 2013, by Sens. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, and Barbara Boxer, D-CA, had already been struggling to gain traction in Congress amid the steady volume of HARP refis in recent months and Republican resistance to expanding current HARP eligibility requirements. HARP had been scheduled to expire at the end of this year before the FHFA’s directive to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac earlier this month to extend the refi program through Dec. 31, 2015.