Ginnie Mae has unveiled new plans for issuer standards as well as steps to boost liquidity in the mortgage servicing rights (MSR) market. Agency officials at a summit hosted by Ginnie Mae this week in Washington, DC, said both actions are designed to avoid issuer failures and to preserve residential mortgage servicing as an economically viable activity and MSRs as an attractive asset class. The officials said changes will be made to Ginnie’s mortgage-backed securities program to support the agency’s transformation from a pre-crisis bank-driven government MBS program to a post-crisis program where non-depositories and smaller financial institutions play a much bigger role. By the middle of next year, approximately a third of Ginnie MSRs will have changed hands over the previous four years, agency officials said. Many of the new owners of the servicing rights are ...

Approved issuers must ensure that loans have the requisite federal insurance or guarantee before bundling them for securitization, cautioned Ginnie Mae. Loans that fail Ginnie’s “loan matching” review will be tagged as “uninsured” and will not be accepted for securitization, according to John Kozak, a Ginnie Mae account executive and a panelist at a conference sponsored by the agency this week. Ginnie Mae uses loan matching to screen for mortgages that may have been endorsed on paper but have not been actually insured or guaranteed by either the FHA, VA or the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Development. Every month, Ginnie Mae takes a certain lender’s entire mortgage portfolio and throws it up against the agency’s insured/guaranteed database in search for loan mismatches. To do this, the agency uses “two-string match” criteria, which consist of a ...

An estimated $336 million out of a $614 million settlement that JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay for not complying with FHA requirements will go towards stabilizing the agency’s ailing Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund. On Feb. 4, 2014, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York took over a whistleblower lawsuit and started an investigation of Chase on behalf of the government for alleged violations of the False Claims Act. The whistleblower or “relator” alleged that Chase, an approved FHA direct endorsement lender, had not followed FHA requirements when underwriting loans, causing the MMIF to incur significant losses when the borrowers defaulted on their loans. The U.S. Attorney filed suit against Chase based on the results of an audit conducted by HUD’s Inspector General that looked into the bank’s underwriting and refinancing of FHA loans. The lawsuit alleged that ...

CFPB Deputy Director Steve Antonakes told attendees at the North Carolina Bankers Association’s mortgage conference last week that lenders need to start prepping for the bureau’s impending TILA/RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule, known in bureau-speak these days as the “TRID.” While the use of the TRID’s new Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure forms is not required until August 2015, “mortgage lenders should already be working on the new rule and getting ready now,” Antonakes urged. “Significant changes to business operations and technology platforms will require close collaboration with third-party service providers. “While many mortgage institutions are already deep into implementing these changes, we want to make sure that everyone understands the need to be focusing on August 2015 now,” Antonakes emphasized...

The CFPB’s integrated disclosure rule will be “treacherous” for mortgage lenders and will likely be as challenging to comply with as its massive size and complexity suggests, according to top industry experts. Speaking to attendees of an Inside Mortgage Finance webinar last week on the CFPB’s TILA/RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule – known as “TRID” – Rod Alba, senior regulatory counsel for the American Bankers Association, rattled off a number of concerns that mortgage lenders still have with the new rule, which is set to take effect Aug. 1, 2015. “The regulation is enormously voluminous in length. The sheer size of this rule, we think, makes this regulation treacherous for banks in terms of liability, in terms of enforcement, in terms of understanding ...

Long-time leaders in the money transfer space Western Union and MoneyGram – along with relative newcomer PayPal – are collectively responsible for a huge 62 percent of the complaints consumers filed with the CFPB about their wire transfer transactions over the last year, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside the CFPB. Western Union had the dubious distinction of leading the way with 356 cumulative gripes from the second quarter of 2013 to the second quarter of 2014. The biggest belly-ache about the company fit into the “fraud or scam” category, with 160 such citations, followed by “money not available as promised,” which was cited by 56 consumers. MoneyGram came in with the second-largest number of consumer grievances (215), with ...

The CFPB recently warned credit card companies of the risk of engaging in deceptive and/or abusive acts and practices in connection with solicitations that offer a promotional annual percentage rate (APR) on a particular transaction – such as convenience checks, deferred interest/promotional interest rate purchases, and balance transfers – over a defined period of time. The bureau said it is concerned that some companies are luring consumers with offers of reduced or zero interest for a specific purchase or balances transferred from another credit card, and then hitting them with surprise interest charges. In CFPB Bulletin 2014-02, the bureau states that it has observed that some card issuers do not adequately convey in their marketing materials that a consumer who accepts such ...

Last week, the law firm of Fredrick J. Hanna & Associates filed a motion to dismiss the enforcement action brought by the CFPB against it back in July. The bureau accused the firm and its three principal partners – Frederick Hanna, Joseph Cooling and Robert Winter – of operating a debt-collection lawsuit mill that used illegal tactics to intimidate consumers into paying debts they may not owe.Between 2009 and 2013, the firm filed more than 350,000 debt-collection lawsuits in Georgia alone, according to the CFPB. The bureau further alleged the defendants collected millions of dollars each year through these lawsuits, often from consumers who may not actually have owed the debts.But in its motion to dismiss, Hanna & Associates argued ...

The CFPB remains quite concerned about the risks consumers face from the sustained high volume of mortgage servicing transfers and issued new guidance that highlights what its examiners will pay keen attention to going forward. “The CFPB advises mortgage servicers that its examiners will be carefully reviewing servicers’ compliance with federal consumer financial laws applicable to servicing transfers,” the new guidance stated. These will include Regulation X under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, Regulation Z under the Truth in Lending Act, Regulation V under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act’s prohibitions on unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (UDAAPs). At the top of ...

The CFPB recently fined auto finance company First Investors Financial Services Group Inc. $2.75 million for allegedly failing to fix known flaws in a computer system that was providing inaccurate information to credit reporting agencies. The bureau also ordered the Houston-based company to fix its errors and change its business practices. The CFPB said its investigation found that First Investors furnished inaccurate information about its customers to credit reporting agencies for at least three years. “When First Investors discovered the problem in April 2011, it notified the vendor but did nothing more,” the CFPB said. “The company did not replace the system or take any steps to correct the inaccurate information it had supplied. “It continued for years to use ...