One trade group said Phillips has already reached out to the industry, gathering opinions on key issues facing the market, including Fannie and Freddie…
More changes, or at least additional guidance, may be in the offing for the pending Home Mortgage Disclosure Act rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that is scheduled to take effect next year, agency Director Richard Cordray said last week during an appearance on Capitol Hill. During a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Brad Sherman, D-CA, pointed out, “Studies have shown that in some geographic areas, it is possible to determine the identity of nearly 100 percent of the borrowers using the data that lenders are required to collect and report by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. This is despite the fact that that act supposedly provides for anonymous data in its final form.” Sherman also ...
The CFPB is not letting any grass grow under its feet on the examination and supervision front, the bureau’s latest semi-annual report to Congress shows. Under its previous Examiner Commissioning Program (ECP), which became effective Oct. 27, 2014, the agency had issued 173 commissions to examiners, field managers, and headquarters staff. Under the new ECP, an additional 20 examiners have achieved commissioned examiner status, bringing the total number of commissioned examiners to 187, which accounts for attrition through retirement and departures from the CFPB. On the technology front, the bureau is upgrading its existing examination management software. “The new system will aid the CFPB in supervising and enforcing federal consumer financial law by utilizing current technology to support monitoring of ...
Consumer complaints to the CFPB about mortgages are down in every single category tracked by this publication, and in fact show double-digit declines in all but one grouping, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside the CFPB. Total mortgage-related criticisms to the bureau came to a relatively scant 8,334 for the period ending March 31, 2017, the second lowest first quarter total in the five-plus years since the agency began collecting such data in the fourth quarter of 2011. That number represents a decline of 14.8 percent from the fourth quarter and an even larger drop of 23.0 percent from the same period one year ago.On the loan modification front, borrower gripes fell to 2,987 during 1Q17, ...
In remarks recently at an event of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, CFPB Director Richard Cordray spelled out how the bureau is trying to aid the mortgage industry’s compliance efforts by promoting greater understanding of its rules, as well as regulatory review, streamlining and modernization. “Our efforts with the mortgage rules went much further than simply reacting passively to industry inquiries (though we have fielded thousands of them),” the director said. “We also took affirmative steps to help the industry understand our rules through publications, videos, webinars, and phone calls with individual institutions.” The bureau adopted a diagnostic and corrective approach to supervision in the early months to ease anxieties about the difficulties of complying with certain components of the ...