The investor-plaintiffs claim that Fannie and two of the company’s former executives made false and misleading statements about the mortgage giant’s internal controls and its exposure to subprime.

Ocwen's open letter to borrowers likely will not assuage shareholders who have lost a ton of money on the firm.

Industry consultant Joe Garrett notes that one of his clients (back in 2003) had 52 loan officers and “about 52 comp plans”…

In a noteworthy concession to the mortgage lending industry, the CFPB last week finalized a “right to cure” loans in which a lender inadvertently breaches the 3 percent cap on points and fees for a loan that would otherwise be deemed a qualified mortgage under the agency’s ability-to-repay rule. Under amendments finalized this past Wednesday, if a lender discovers after the loan has closed that it has exceeded the 3 percent cap, there are limited circumstances in which it can pay a refund of the excess amount with interest to the consumer and the loan will still be considered a QM. First, the refund must occur within 210 days after the loan is made. The lender must also maintain and ...

The CFPB’s latest Student Loan Ombudsman’s Annual Report found fault with the performance of servicers in the relatively small number of instances in which borrowers – most of whom were struggling – have complained to the CFPB (less than 9,000), out of a universe of millions of loans outstanding.Since the bureau began accepting private student loan complaints in March 2012, the largest subset of complaints stem from borrowers seeking to avoid default during a period of financial hardship, the report noted. “Most frequently, borrowers submitting complaints are seeking to modify repayment terms to obtain a payment they can actually afford,” said the CFPB. “While student loan industry participants have stated that they intend to increase the number of programs to assist ...

After rising for two consecutive quarters, borrower complaints to the CFPB about their private student loans have dropped for the last two reporting periods, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside the CFPB. Following up on the second quarter drop of 16.3 percent, borrower gripes fell 14.5 percent in the third quarter, the latest data from the bureau’s consumer complaint database show. Among the top 10 companies ranked by borrower grumblings, a wide variety of results could be clearly seen. Six of the top 10 saw double-digit declines during the third quarter, but two others saw increases of that magnitude, most notably Nelnet, up 33.3 percent from the second quarter. The biggest drop among the top 10 was ...

The CFPB finalized its annual privacy notices rule last week, leaving it unchanged from its May proposed rule, other than some technical and clarifying revisions. The new rule creates an alternative delivery method for the privacy disclosure required every year under Regulation P (the implementation regulation of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act), which financial institutions will be able to use under certain circumstances. The new rule applies to both banks and those nonbanks that are within the CFPB’s jurisdiction under the GLBA. More specifically, the rule applies to “financial institutions,” as defined in Reg P. That includes banks, credit unions, mortgage companies, mortgage brokers and debt buyers. Under the CFPB’s new rule, financial institutions will be able to post privacy notices online ...

The $13 million settlement reached between the CFPB and Castle & Cooke Mortgage Co. back in November 2013 was not the end of the dispute for the mortgage lender. It now faces a possible class-action lawsuit brought by one of the aggrieved parties who had already been compensated under the terms of the settlement with the bureau. Homeowner Luis Cabrales, on behalf of himself and perhaps in excess of 9,500 similarly situated individuals, recently filed his complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, Fresno Division. The class, so far, has not been certified. The legal argument is that the applicable statutes of limitation of the claims alleged in the new complaint were “tolled” (suspended or ...

A recent study by Nationwide Title Clearing, Inc., a research and document-processing vendor for the residential mortgage industry, found that nearly half a million homeowners could be negatively affected by inaccurate servicing records. NTC found that out of 2,285,665 servicing database records that were verified against the collateral file, 24,490 loans (1.07 percent) had significant discrepancies. When viewed against roughly 49 million outstanding residential mortgages, that suggests as many as 490,000 homeowners could be affected by faulty servicer database records. “These database inaccuracies might have represented ‘acceptable risk’ in times past – but in today’s compliance-oriented landscape, such a high number of errors could bring increased scrutiny and penalties from CFPB regulators, not to mention ...