Late last week, the Supreme Court of the United States delivered some long-sought clarity on the legitimacy of disparate-impact claims brought under the Fair Housing Act in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. The highest court in the land validated the position of various lower courts, regulatory agencies and administrations over the last four decades that disparate impact is ...

Capital requirements and standards proposed by state regulators for nonbank servicers appear to be unnecessary, according to trade groups representing servicers. State regulators issued the proposal in March, seeking to ensure that nonbanks conduct their servicing operations in a safe and sound manner and have strong consumer protections in place. “It is not clear that nonbank mortgage servicers require a prudential regulatory regime,” a group of 37 state ...

Originations of adjustable-rate mortgages in the past seven years have been well below production seen before the financial crisis. While low interest rates have contributed to limiting originations of ARMs, industry analysts suggest that other factors will continue to constrain ARM production even when interest rates rise. An estimated $41.0 billion in ARMs were originated in the first quarter of 2015, down 10.0 percent from the previous quarter and off ...

Smith said his team has reviewed thousands of documents and interviewed at least nine Ocwen executives...

Many in the industry wonder why it appears that access to credit remains so tight, seven years after the last financial crisis.

According to the RHS, the Internal Revenue Service action is meant to deter any fraud that might result from identity theft.

Since then, Quicken has conducted a thorough review and has “proactively taken steps to ensure all [VA] mailings reflect our brand and quality standards,” Emerson said.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week validated the disparate-impact legal theory as it relates to housing discrimination in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. And while the immediate effect of the ruling has more to do with the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s enforcement of the Fair Housing Act’s restrictions on disparate impact, there are definitely implications for the CFPB’s enforcement of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act’s prohibitions against disparate impact. The crux of this case was whether disparate-impact claims are cognizable under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, where a plaintiff alleges discrimination based on the disparate impact that a defendant’s “facially neutral” practice has upon members of ...

The CFPB, much to the lending industry’s consternation, last week “went live” with the online publishing of more than 7,700 consumer complaint narratives addressing mortgages, bank accounts, credit cards, debt collection and other issues. Under its new final policy statement, the bureau is extending its existing practice of disclosing data on consumer complaints “to include narratives for which opt-in consumer consent is obtained and a robust personal information scrubbing standard and methodology has been applied.” The purposes of the database include providing consumers with timely and understandable information about financial products and services, and improving the functioning, transparency and efficiency of markets for such products and services. The CFPB said that adding additional information to the database, and hearing narratives ...

The CFPB last week formally proposed amending its integrated mortgage disclosure rule under the Truth in Lending Act and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act – the so-called TRID – to move the rule’s effective date to October 3, 2015, which would give the industry a two-month delay. Although the TILA-RESPA final rule was published on December 31, 2013, and received widespread public and Congressional attention, the bureau said it “recently discovered that it inadvertently had not submitted the rule report to Congress as required.” The bureau’s oversight came despite having 18 months to anticipate and plan for the submission. “Immediately upon discovering its error, the bureau submitted the rule report to both Houses of Congress and the Government Accountability Office on ...