Members of the Senate and House Grand Old Party wasted no time in seizing upon a new report from the Government Accountability Office that confirmed the huge scope of the CFPB’s data collection initiative and cited weaknesses with data security and privacy. “The CFPB’s massive data collection effort is an unwarranted, unwelcome intrusion into the private financial lives of millions of Americans,” said Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee ranking member Mike Crapo, R-ID, who requested the study. “This GAO report confirms what the bureau would not – that it has been collecting information on up to 600 million American financial accounts, and it does not have the proper safeguards in place to protect the information it is collecting,” he ...

Credit history and debt-to-income outpaced collateral as the primary contributors to mortgage application denials in the purchase-loan segment in 2013, according to an analysis by Inside the CFPB of the latest Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data released last week by the CFPB and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. It was a much closer horse race in the refinance space, but then again, collateral is always more of an issue for refis. Credit history was identified as the cause of denial for 26.3 percent of applications last year in FHA/VA purchase mortgages, followed by DTI at 23.3 percent, with collateral registering only at 12.4 percent. Things were a little more competitive in the conventional home purchase loan space. There, credit ...

At the top of the heap was the Federal Reserve, which boosted its agency MBS portfolio by 3.8 percent during the second quarter.

The government-sponsored enterprises plan to expand their risk-sharing activities in a number of ways in 2015, according to officials at the GSEs and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Kevin Palmer, a vice president of strategic credit costing and structuring at Freddie Mac, said Freddie is set to include a broader group of mortgages in its risk-sharing transactions in an effort to increase the investor base. Fannie has similar plans. The GSEs have issued...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency should direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to move toward a common, fungible security while also striving to ensure the government-sponsored enterprises’ safety and soundness and promote liquidity and access to the secondary mortgage market, according to early feedback from industry groups. Last month, the FHFA issued a request for input regarding its strategic plan for fiscal years 2015 through 2019. The FHFA plan identifies three strategic goals for the GSEs: ensuring safe and sound regulated entities; ensuring liquidity, stability and access in housing finance; and managing Fannie’s and Freddie’s ongoing conservatorship. The Mortgage Bankers Association called on...

In other words, mortgage banking is now supposed to be a “sure thing” where no one – and we do mean no one – takes on risk or fails. Ever.

A number of steps have been taken to reform the non-agency mortgage-backed security market but more changes are necessary, according to Michael Stegman, counselor on housing finance policy to the Treasury Department. Last week at a conference hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, Stegman detailed regulatory changes necessary to increase activity in the non-agency MBS market along with other changes the industry can work toward. “The last remaining piece of the puzzle is putting in place ...

Ginnie Mae has unveiled new plans for issuer standards as well as steps to boost liquidity in the mortgage servicing rights (MSR) market. Agency officials at a summit hosted by Ginnie Mae this week in Washington, DC, said both actions are designed to avoid issuer failures and to preserve residential mortgage servicing as an economically viable activity and MSRs as an attractive asset class. The officials said changes will be made to Ginnie’s mortgage-backed securities program to support the agency’s transformation from a pre-crisis bank-driven government MBS program to a post-crisis program where non-depositories and smaller financial institutions play a much bigger role. By the middle of next year, approximately a third of Ginnie MSRs will have changed hands over the previous four years, agency officials said. Many of the new owners of the servicing rights are ...

Approved issuers must ensure that loans have the requisite federal insurance or guarantee before bundling them for securitization, cautioned Ginnie Mae. Loans that fail Ginnie’s “loan matching” review will be tagged as “uninsured” and will not be accepted for securitization, according to John Kozak, a Ginnie Mae account executive and a panelist at a conference sponsored by the agency this week. Ginnie Mae uses loan matching to screen for mortgages that may have been endorsed on paper but have not been actually insured or guaranteed by either the FHA, VA or the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Development. Every month, Ginnie Mae takes a certain lender’s entire mortgage portfolio and throws it up against the agency’s insured/guaranteed database in search for loan mismatches. To do this, the agency uses “two-string match” criteria, which consist of a ...

Obama administration officials and federal regulators met recently with mortgage industry representatives to discuss lender overlays and other obstacles preventing borrowers with slightly tainted credit and first-time homebuyers from obtaining a mortgage. Neither administration officials nor industry participants, however, spoke on or off the record about the things that were discussed during the Sept. 17 meeting at the White House. It was also unclear whether both sides have agreed on any solutions to the issues that lenders say are preventing them from lending. Sources, however, said one major issue is lenders’ uncertainty about their legal responsibilities and liabilities, which already have cost the industry billions of dollars in massive legacy settlements. Lenders have complained that even the slightest loan paperwork error could force them out of the ...