Industry representatives who, since the 1990s, have been imagining a world of electronic mortgage transactions and related documentation took renewed inspiration from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s announcement this week of a pilot project aimed at using the latest in technology to diminish the “pain points” of the closing process. Brian Webster, the originations program manager for mortgage markets at the CFPB, said last week that the bureau had identified 1,480 such sore spots. But during a public forum held this week, the CFPB focused on a handful of primary problems it said consumers have with the way mortgage closings are handled in the American market. First, they feel...

As for details, a spokesman for the company said Ellie isn’t talking about the topic at this time. In an email exchange with IMFnews, mortgage technology consultant Tony Garritano of Progress in Lending called the whole episode “very bizarre”…

The CFPB plans to launch a pilot project as part of its efforts to improve the mortgage closing process.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plans to announce a voluntary pilot project next week related to its efforts to streamline and improve the mortgage-closing process – an initiative likely to rely heavily on the industry’s latest technological capabilities, and perhaps stimulate some innovation in the process. The pilot will be formally announced on Wednesday during a live online webcast of a public forum the bureau plans to conduct at its headquarters in Washington, DC ...

There are a variety of components for a successful compliance-management program mortgage lenders should implement, but the primary goal needs to be preventing harm to consumers, according to bank examiners with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “Given the challenges associated with the regulatory environment of today, we’d like to emphasize the importance of looking at bank operations while asking two questions from a consumer compliance perspective,” said ...

The outage of Ellie Mae's Encompass systems at the end of the first quarter appears to be due to a malfunction on Ellie Mae's end, not a malicious attack.

Mortgage lenders are still smarting from a recent cyber-attack on their loan origination software provider, Ellie Mae, but a larger question now looms: If a company of Ellie’s stature was hacked, can it happen to other vendors as well? Tony Garritano, a consultant who manages a mortgage technology advocacy group called Progress in Lending, said, to the best of his knowledge, the attack on Ellie Mae is a first for the industry – and likely not the last. “As more lenders and their vendors migrate to the Internet this will happen again and again,” he said. He notes...

New York regulators want to know whether the additional costs will be passed onto consumers. Ellie Mae is not commenting.

Hisey, a former Fannie Mae executive, has been given the title of chief strategy and external affairs officer, a newly created position at the nonbank lender/servicer.

One mortgage technology expert had this to say on the Ellie Mae shutdown: “This is going to get ugly. Real money is lost when you can’t close loans on time.”