The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority will soon propose increasing transparency on trading of certain MBS, but officials say it won’t the market. Late last week, the FINRA board of governors authorized issuance of a regulatory notice soliciting comment on a proposal to amend rules for Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine, or TRACE. The proposal would provide for public dissemination of transaction information in real time for deals valued under $1 million, and in aggregate weekly and monthly reports for transactions valued at $1 million or more. FINRA Chairman and CEO Rick Ketchum said...

By some measurements, the market for commercial MBS backed by single-family rental units has been successful, drawing investors from Wall Street, the hedge fund community and overseas. But that success, to some degree, is beginning to worry the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research. Moreover, the OFR also is expressing anxieties about mortgage real estate investment trusts and repurchase agreements. As of September 2014, roughly $5 billion of single-family rental MBS had been issued...

Structured Finance Industry Group staff and some investor members met recently with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Structured Finance to talk about the initial reaction that investors had to the final Regulation AB II rule. Among topics addressed were market trends, operational aspects and scope of applicability of the final rule, according to an update SFIG provided its members recently. Meanwhile, the SFIG is...

What do Fannie and Freddie really think of nonbanks? Read their SEC filings.

Executives at mortgage lending operations and other financial services providers are increasingly relying on the latest technology to get a better handle on consumer complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a recent survey by Aptean, an enterprise application software vendor based in Atlanta. “To minimize both costs and consumer friction, savvy financial institutions are leveraging technology to identify and manage the root cause of consumer complaints ...

The data to be reported under the CFPB’s proposal likely will inflame the current fair lending regulatory environment.

Rep. Ed Royce of California: "Money coming in from the GSEs should go to the taxpayers instead of a slush fund for ideological housing groups to play around with.”

A proposed FHA administrative fee as high as 4 basis points to fund quality assurance enforcement and technology upgrades also went down in flames.

But there's one little wrinkle: the GSEs cannot pass the cost of funding the HTF onto lenders…

The migration of mortgage servicing rights from “more tightly to less tightly regulated parts of the financial system” should be addressed by regulators, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research. The OFR, which was created by the Dodd-Frank Act to serve the Financial Stability Oversight Council, said Basel capital requirements have created incentives for banks to sell MSRs to nonbanks. In its annual report, the OFR cautioned that nonbanks aren’t as well regulated as banks. “Mortgage servicing activity and the accompanying risks appear...