Smaller residential mortgage servicers are going to be challenged by the increased costs of new servicing requirements from the CFPB as they seek to opportunistically grow through strategic acquisitions, according to analysts at Fitch Ratings. “Many U.S. residential mortgage servicers have been working diligently to meet the new servicing requirements,” the Fitch crew said in a recent analysis. “Many large servicers have already made significant progress towards meeting the Jan. 10, 2014, deadline, in particular those servicers...

The Office of the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve Board plans to complete several audits and evaluations of the CFPB, including one on the CFPB’s own compliance with the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires the bureau to describe the impact of any proposed rule on the cost of credit for small entities. Also on tap is an evaluation of the CFPB’s supervision program for large banks and nonbanks, and a third on the bureau’s hiring process. Also, the OIG will join its counterparts at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the National Credit Union...

The CFPB has released updates to its mortgage origination examination procedures and its mortgage servicing exam procedures. “These updates harmonize existing procedures for handling mortgage origination and mortgage servicing examinations with the revised interagency procedures that address the new mortgage regulations issued in January 2013, which have now taken effect,” the bureau said. The exam procedures for both mortgage origination and mortgage servicing now cover final rules issued by CFPB through November 2013. These...

Warner Introduces Prepaid Card Fee Legislation. Sen. Mark Warner, D‐VA, recently introduced legislation that would require new disclosures of prepaid card fees. Under Warner’s bill, the CFPB would be required to standardize the required disclosures. Under S. 1903, the Prepaid Card Disclosure Act of 2014, the bureau would be required to issue rules to establish the format for the fee disclosures. Also, the CFPB would have the authority to require an electronic link to the disclosures in the form of a quick response code, barcode or similar...

Industry analysts predict that the New York ruling will limit rep-and-warrant claims on vintage non-agency MBS as well as future claims on recently issued jumbo MBS.

Radian's Loan Amount Estimator enables lenders that are capping their debt-to-income ratios at 43 percent to calculate maximum loan amounts and sale prices based on the MI product selected.

Refinance mortgages accounted for 80.1 percent of agency production back in 2012, but that declined to 65.6 percent last year and just 45.3 percent of fourth-quarter business.

Fannie Mae this week priced its second capital markets risk-sharing transaction, offering a total of $750 million in tranches for sale based off a reference pool of $29.31 billion in agency mortgages. The deal uses the same synthetic structure seen on previous risk-sharing transactions from the government-sponsored enterprises. Edward DeMarco, the former acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, had been pushing the GSEs to issue risk-sharing deals using a senior-subordinate structure that would not be eligible for the to-be announced market. With Mel Watt now the director of the FHFA, non-TBA risk-sharing transactions from the GSEs could be even less likely. Laurel Davis, vice president for credit risk transfer at Fannie, said...

Ginnie Mae gave seller/servicers a heads-up on the longer approval times in late November at an “education summit” in Washington attended by both new and existing issuers.

The statute of limitations for filing representation-and-warranty claims on non-agency MBS starts when a deal is issued, not when a defective loan isn’t cured, according to a recent ruling by the appellate court in New York. Industry analysts suggest that the ruling will limit rep-and-warrant claims on vintage non-agency MBS as well as future claims on recently issued jumbo MBS. In December, the appellate division of New York’s Supreme Court dismissed ACE Securities Corp. v. DB Structured Products. The lawsuit was brought by a trustee on behalf of investors against Deutsche Bank, the issuer of ACE 2006-SL2, a non-agency MBS issued in 2006. The investors, along with HSBC Bank, the trustee, were looking to enforce rep-and-warrant claims in 2012. New York imposes...