Nationstar Mortgage has moved its offshore call centers back to the U.S. to improve service to customers, particularly those who prefer to deal with domestic company representatives. The Dallas-based nonbank described the move as part of its two-year plan to become more customer-centric and provide more personalized service to its more than 3 million customers. The shift starts with rebranding, which appears designed to create the impression that the customer is dealing with ...

Landon Parsons, senior advisor of Moelis & Company, a firm that proposes a recap and release blueprint for the GSEs, said the government is too involved in housing. Parsons spoke at a Financial Services Roundtable forum earlier this month focused on GSE reform. The senior advisor admitted to having clients with skin in the game, but said he advises “non-litigating GSE shareholders.” He acknowledged that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a “social good” component to them, but Parsons said many of the policies were flawed. Parsons said most of the GSE reform plans to date have been written by advocacy or special interest groups and have introduced concepts that often require...

loanDepot would like to see more digital closings, according to Dominick Marchetti, the firm’s chief technology officer. The loanDepot official said there has been very little use of e-closings since he first witnessed one over a decade ago in 2002. “It’s fairly disappointing, actually,” Marchetti said, adding that fewer than 100 digital mortgages are closed per month. Only 1,600 of the nation’s 3,800 counties are equipped to handle digital closings, he added. The slow adoption rate ...

The U.S. Mortgage Insurers weighed in on how four think tank and trade group GSE reform proposals align with the group’s reform principles. Mortgage insurers have said that protecting taxpayers, promoting stability, ensuring accessibility and fostering transparency are important components of a successful reform plan. The Milken Institute plan recommends that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be taken out of conservatorship and their charters amended to turn them into mutual entities owned and operated by seller-servicers, with Ginnie acting as a stand-alone government corporation. The USMI said the proposal works to protect taxpayers by requiring more private capital and promotes stability by utilizing Ginnie’s existing infrastructure and systems.

Mortgage escrow accounts are getting more popular among lenders and borrowers on both state and national levels, according to CoreLogic, a provider of financial analytics and business intelligence. The analysis confirms a trend observed over the past several years to move borrowers to mortgage escrow accounts, said CoreLogic Principal Dominique Lalisse. In a blog, Lalisse noted that nearly 80 percent of borrowers have established escrow accounts from which ...

Reps. Randy Hultgren, R-IL, and Gwen Moore, D-WI, introduced a bill in favor of captive insurers maintaining their Federal Home Loan Bank membership. Captive insurance lenders that joined the system prior to January 2016 currently have five years to terminate their FHLBank membership. Those that came into the system after that date have one year to exit the system. H.R. 289, the Housing Opportunity Mortgage Expansion (HOME) Act, would allow the five-year captives to maintain their membership, as long as they can demonstrate a commitment to residential mortgage activities. The bill’s sponsors explained that the legislation supports the notion that companies with a history and mission of supporting residential housing should be able to continue to serve their communities.

Federal Reserve Vice Chair Stanley Fischer said that government involvement in securitization weakened the link between the mortgage loan and the lender. He also warned that another global housing crisis could be looming. During a speech at the FNB-Riksbank Macroprudential Conference in Amsterdam, he acknowledged that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS helped to expand mortgage credit availability, but added that the rapid rise in credit access coupled with rising house prices can threaten the financial system’s resilience. “One particularly problematic policy is government guarantees of mortgage-related assets,” said Fischer. He mentioned the period leading up to the financial crisis when investors viewed agency MBS as having an implicit government guarantee, “despite the GSEs’ representations to the contrary.”

Mortgage-banking activity slowed significantly at commercial banks and savings institutions in the first quarter, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. Banks reported a total of $71.99 billion in retail 1-4 family originations in their mortgage-banking operations during the first three months of 2017, down 40.1 percent from the fourth quarter of last year. Loan sales volume also fell off sharply, dropping 29.1 percent to $163.75 billion during ... [Includes one data chart]

Congress has GSE reform on the radar and even before this week’s hearing on GSE reform, Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA, said he was optimistic that housing finance reform might happen sooner than many expect. Warner, who co-authored a reform bill four years ago, recently said, “This may surprise some folks, but I think the stars may align where you could actually see housing-finance reform happen in front of some of the Dodd-Frank reform.” The Virginia senator made the comments at a Mortgage Bankers Association conference in Washington, DC, on June 20. He said there appears to be bipartisan consensus on housing finance reform.

As much as the False Claims Act has been a formidable government enforcement tool against FHA loan originators, the statute is also being used increasingly against mortgage servicers, according to compliance experts. Within the last 18 months, the DOJ has expanded FCA use to reverse mortgages and loan servicing, according to Phil Schulman and Krista Cooley, both partners in Mayer Brown’s Washington office and members of the firm’s Consumer Financial Services group, during a recent podcast. While the Department of Justice has consistently used the FCA and its treble-damage provision to enforce FHA loan origination rules, the economic downturn and foreclosure crisis has put...