The Office of the Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner has launched a preliminary investigation into lender-paid mortgage insurance, a revelation that is causing additional unease at private MIs. Sources confirmed to Inside Mortgage Finance this week that insurance regulators in the state are looking at what one official called discounting “practices” for the product. He added: “Wisconsin is asking them to name names: ‘Who are you giving discounts to, on what basis, etc.” This official, who did not want to go on the record regarding the matter, said...

Lenders pushed back against state regulators that are considering changes to the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System and Registry licensing forms and the Mortgage Call Report. The State Regulatory Registry, which operates nationwide systems for state regulators, received a total of 11 comments from individuals and organizations regarding a proposal issued in May. Lenders provided a few constructive suggestions along with voicing frustration regarding state regulators’ data collection efforts. Pete Mills, a senior vice president of residential policy and member services at the Mortgage Bankers Association, urged...

Nearly a score of industry trade groups sent a letter this week to the leadership of the House Financial Services Committee, urging them to pass legislation to provide a reasonable hold-harmless period for enforcement of the CFPB’s TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosures (TRID) regulation for lenders trying to do their best to comply. “We appreciate that the bureau indicated it will be sensitive to the progress made by those entities that make good-faith efforts to comply,” the 19 groups said in a letter to Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, and Ranking Member Maxine Waters, D-CA. “At the same time, the industry needs...

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority started publishing pricing data for a broad range of ABS this week in an effort to increase transparency. Industry participants suggest that the new disclosures will prompt a decrease in trading and have some impact on pricing. The ABS pricing details are available through the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine and include deals issued as 144A private placements. “The dissemination of transaction information in ABS is...

With interest rates rising again, the future looks somewhat cloudy for real estate investment trusts that invest in MBS, a situation that investors have grown accustomed to the past few years. According to figures compiled by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, the 28 mortgage investing REITs tracked by the firm had a combined market capitalization rate of $47.8 billion at the end of May, a slight drop from a year ago when the tally was $49.0 billion. Then again, not all of the 28 are...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau indicated this week that it will be somewhat accommodating to mortgage lenders when it comes to enforcing the pending integrated disclosure rule under the Truth in Lending Act and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. The agency confirmed in a blog post that it delivered a letter to members of Congress stating that its oversight of the TRID rule “will be sensitive to the progress made by those entities that have been squarely focused on making good-faith efforts to come into compliance with the rule on time.” The agency also said...

Last week’s $9 million settlement between wholesale lender Provident Funding and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Justice to resolve allegations of excessive discriminatory fees on the part of independent mortgage brokers, has some key takeaways for the rest of the mortgage industry, top compliance attorneys say. “The first is that it obviously signals that mortgage lending is still on the radar at these agencies,” even though their attention has evolved into other types of lending products, “and they are still concerned with wholesale mortgage pricing,” said Melanie Brody, partner and co-lead of the fair lending practice at the K&L Gates law firm in Washington, DC. She also noted...

Democrats in the Senate and the House this week re-introduced a regulatory relief bill that would grant qualified-mortgage status for loans held in portfolio, but only for smaller financial institutions. Banks and credit unions with less than $2 billion in consolidated assets which originate fewer than 2,000 mortgage loans per year could make loans that exceed the 43 percent debt-to-income ratio under the QM standard and still receive the QM safe harbor so long as the loan is held in portfolio, according to a summary of the draft. Depository institutions with less than $10 billion in assets would get...

The CFPB and the Florida Attorney General’s office were granted a $27.7 million final judgment on Friday against the Hoffman Law Group and corporate affiliates, which allegedly used deceptive marketing practices and scammed distressed homeowners into paying illegal advance fees. The lawsuit named Hoffman Law Group (formerly Residential Litigation Group), its operators, Michael Harper, Benn Willcox and attorney Marc Hoffman, and its affiliated companies, Nationwide Management Solutions, Legal Intake Solutions, File Intake Solutions, and BM Marketing Group, all based in North Palm Beach, FL. The two government agencies accused the companies of tricking consumers into paying millions of dollars in illegal upfront fees to join frivolous lawsuits that the companies falsely claimed would pressure banks to modify their loans or ...

Provident Funding, one of the largest wholesale mortgage lenders in the nation, has agreed to pay $9 million in damages for funding loans with higher broker fees on mortgages made to African Americans and Hispanics over a five-year period ending in 2011. According to a statement and notice of charges put out late last week by the CFPB, the privately held lender charged roughly 14,000 minorities higher “total broker fees” than white borrowers. The $9 million will feed a settlement fund that will pay minorities harmed by the practice. “The higher fees were not based on the borrowers’ creditworthiness or other objective criteria related to borrower risk or loan characteristics, but on their race or national origin,” the CFPB said...