The Department of Veterans Affairs has announced it will accept electronic signatures in closing home loans with a VA guaranty. The VA said lenders are not required to use electronic signatures in VA loans but if they choose to, they must comply with the Federal Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, or the E-Sign Act. The measure was signed into law in June 2000. The E-Sign Act establishes the baseline rules for Internet commerce, including nondiscrimination between handwritten and electronic signatures. The law also requires that electronic records be ...

The legal action against JPMorgan and UBS is part of the NCUA’s larger pursuit of 11 lawsuits tied to CU purchases of $14 billion in non-agency MBS.

Michigan Mutual is the latest mortgage lender to announce cut-backs in its processing staff.

With mortgage rates at their highest level in more than two years, the long-awaited boom in mergers and acquisitions may finally be here. But don’t expect sellers to accept just any price. “M&A is picking up,” said Larry Charbonneau, who runs a boutique advisory firm, Charbonneau & Associates. “The big fish want to buy the small ones, but the small ones don’t know if it’s in their best interest to sell yet.” Charbonneau points out...

With origination profits leveling off, some mortgage bankers are looking to cash out. But can they still get top dollar?

Commercial banks and savings institutions continued to generate solid earnings on their mortgage banking activity during the second quarter of 2013, according to a new call report analysis by Inside Mortgage Trends. Banks and thrifts reported $8.164 billion in mortgage banking income during the second quarter, a 6.0 percent increase from the first three months of the year. It was, in fact, the second best quarterly earnings for the industry since the bank call report was amended in ... [Includes two data charts]

Tommy Adkins, director of loan production for Florida Capital Bank Mortgage, has some advice for lenders fearing a tumultuous slowdown in refinancings: cut overhead now and don’t look back. Unfortunately for rank-and-file mortgage workers, cutting overhead means jobs. When Wells Fargo recently announced that it was eliminating 2,300 jobs in its mortgage department, it provided few details on what type of workers were let go except to say most were in fulfillment and processing. A Wells spokesman ...

Federal regulators this week re-proposed risk-retention requirements with an option to align the definition of qualified residential mortgages with the definition of qualified mortgages. The regulators said the alignment will help increase mortgage availability and reduce compliance costs. “The agencies are concerned about the prospect of imposing further constraints on mortgage credit availability at this time, especially as such constraints might disproportionately affect groups that have ...

The spike in interest rates in recent months didn’t cause a significant change in homebuyer behavior, according to the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. The non-cash share of purchase-financing continued to increase in July and sales-to-list price ratios remained elevated, indicating strong demand from homebuyers relying on mortgage financing. Non-cash financing (conventional mortgages, FHA and VA, non-agency, etc.) accounted for 72.1 percent of ...

Trying to sell a residential finance company in a rising rate environment is never an easy thing, much less a mortgage technology company that is known for having a large client base of third-party lenders including loan brokers. But don’t tell that to Ellie Mae. Earlier this month the publicly traded mortgage software vendor saw its share price spike 25 percent after word leaked out that it was contemplating a sale. Although company co-founder and Chief Executive Sigmund Anderman declined to ...