With financial institutions set to report mortgage disclosure data collected in 2018 to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, attorneys are concerned that it may lead to an increase in fair lending investigations and enforcement actions by government agencies.

An increase in asset-based underwriting by banks prompted warnings from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency last week. The OCC said its examiners have seen greater use of asset dissipation underwriting, a practice used to qualify borrowers using a hypothetical income stream from their asset liquidation rather than debt-to-income ratios. Banks are increasingly using asset dissipation or asset depletion as a response to “intense competition” from nonbanks, among other ...

State regulators will likely put more effort into enforcing fair lending laws, even as the CFPB continues to reassess the use of the disparate-impact theory under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

Seth Frotman, the former student loan ombudsman who dramatically quit the CFPB in August, has launched his own initiative to help solve the student debt crisis.

The CFPB last week released a fair lending report covering the agency’s activity in 2017. The report generally summarized the bureau’s past fair lending efforts and laid out its priorities.

Performance of ABS backed by credit-card receivables remained strong in the third quarter of 2018 despite rising consumer-debt levels, according to an update from Moody’s Investors Service.

The spread between interest rates for qualified mortgages and similar non-QMs has narrowed somewhat this year. The lower premium placed on non-QMs suggests that lenders are getting more comfortable with the liability associated with the loans. The findings were detailed recently by two economists at the Federal Reserve who had access to loan-level data from Optimal Blue. The data comprised loan applications and mortgage locks from January 2013 through September 2018 ...

CFPB advisory committee meets by conference call; the bureau issues a financial report for FY2018 that details employee numbers, funding transfer requests and enforcement actions; and other federal agencies propose a rule to raise the appraisal exemption for rural properties.

The implementation of the qualified-mortgage standard has reduced the incidence of lending to consumers with high debt-to-income ratios among nonconforming mortgage applications, and significantly increased the cost of credit, according to the Federal Reserve.

Lenders no longer need to start complying with the CFPB’s payday-lending rule on Aug. 19, 2019, a judge ruled. In an unexpected development, Judge Lee Yeakel of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas Austin Division last week reversed his prior orders that denied the request to delay the compliance date of the payday rule. The case was filed by two industry groups – Community Financial Services Association of America and Consumer Service Alliance of Texas ...