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...
More than 250 members of the House of Representatives have signed onto a letter to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, urging he institute a “grace period” of enforcement with the bureau’s pending integrated disclosure rule that takes effect Aug. 1, 2015. The lawmakers have joined the mortgage lending industry in calling for an ease on tight enforcement of the TILA/RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rule from the Aug. 1 effective date through the end of the year. “[T]his complicated and extensive rule is likely to cause challenges during implementation, which is currently scheduled for Aug. 1, 2015, that could negatively impact consumers,” said the lawmakers. “As you know, the housing market is highly seasonal, with August, September and October ...
Yet another industry concern about the CFPB’s pending TILA/RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rule has emerged. Technology vendor eLynx, based in Cincinnati, has determined that many lenders will be relying at least in part on manually entered data to create the CFPB-mandated Closing Disclosure (CD) after the Aug. 1, 2015, implementation of the new rule. According to the vendor, lenders are concerned that manual data re-entry will be a major cause of disclosure mistakes when the agency’s TRID rule takes effect. eLynx conducted a survey of the hundreds of lenders and settlement professionals currently using its services. “The results are alarming,” the company said. “Only 6 percent have a fully automated process for collecting property-related data from settlement service providers (SSPs).” ...
The latest wave in the tsunami of rulemakings from the CFPB is the pending integrated disclosure rule under the Truth in Lending Act and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. And just the timing aspects related to providing the consumer the loan estimate and the closing disclosure could cause havoc, a top industry attorney warned recently. According to Phillip Schulman, a partner in the Washington, DC, office of the K&L Gates law firm, the biggest problem with the TILA/RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rule has to do with the timing requirements. “You have to give the loan estimate to the borrower within three business days of receiving the application, and no sooner than seven days before consummation or closing of the ...
FSOC Advises Continued Collaboration on Nonbank Mortgage Servicers. The Financial Stability Oversight Council, of which the CFPB is a member, expressed continuing concern about the large share of mortgage servicing rights being handled by nonbank mortgage servicers these days, and urged continued collaboration between state and federal regulators in ratcheting up their oversight to strengthen such companies. “[N]onbank mortgage servicing companies, which in recent years have purchased large amounts of mortgage servicing rights from banks and thrifts, have grown to account for a material portion of the mortgage servicing market,” the report said. FSOC went on to note that in January of this year, the Federal Housing Finance Agency proposed new minimum financial eligibility requirements for mortgage seller/servicers that do ...
NTFN Inc., a direct-endorsement lender in the Dallas-Ft.Worth area, may have to indemnify FHA for losses incurred allegedly due to sloppy underwriting. Results of an audit performed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development inspector general found that 23 loans out of the 3,046 FHA loans originated by NTFN from July 2012 through June 2014 were seriously delinquent in the first year. FHA is considering whether to require indemnification. Despite its low FHA origination volume, NTFN was targeted for a compliance audit because its loan default rate was the second highest in its principal area of business during the audit period. HUD auditors attributed the subpar underwriting to the lender’s poor due diligence, failure to perform early payment default and quality control reviews and to not having an adequate quality control system. The unpaid principal balance of the ...
Whistleblowers that bring a False Claim Act claim against an FHA lender based on previous publicly disclosed information have no standing, according to a recent federal district court ruling. Judge Jack Zouhary of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio dismissed an FCA lawsuit against U.S. Bank because the whistleblower had neither direct nor independent knowledge of the bank’s alleged false claims – two basic requirements for standing in a whistleblower suit. The Advocates for Basic Legal Equality (ABLE), an Ohio-based legal aid group, filed an FCA lawsuit against U.S. Bank for allegedly disregarding and violating FHA regulations. The group accused the bank of filing false claims and collecting payments without evaluating loss mitigation alternatives before foreclosing on properties. According to ABLE, it had consulted with “many people,” whose mortgage loans were ...
New entrants in the Ginnie Mae issuer community expand access to credit at lower cost, deepen the market for Ginnie mortgage servicing rights and help address the agency’s “too-big-to-fail” issue, said the agency’s top executive. “Our top concern is that issuers have the operational and financial strength to meet issuer/servicer obligations,” Tozer said during the recent secondary market conference sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association. The flood of new nonbank issuers into the program has been well documented. While they have diluted the heavy concentration of business in the hands of a few megabanks, many have complex financial structures that are less tested in the marketplace, he said. The pipeline of issuer applicants has dropped dramatically, the Ginnie executive reported. To get approved, an applicant has to show where the cash will come from to ...
A dramatic disconnect has surfaced between different segments of the mortgage industry when it comes to being prepared to comply with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s pending integrated-disclosure rule. Professionals in the land title insurance side of the business are far more confident about their readiness than are depository institutions, recent surveys reveal. A survey conducted in April by the American Land Title Association found that 92 percent of respondents indicated their company will be prepared to implement the new loan estimate and closing disclosures and to comply with the CFPB’s regulation. That number isn’t as good as it seems, though. A much smaller 62.6 percent said they are on schedule for implementation. Another 29.4 percent conceded they are behind ...
If one of the sponsors of the Dodd-Frank Act supports giving mortgage lenders an enforcement break when the CFPB’s integrated disclosure rule kicks in later this year, you know something serious is afoot. Such is indeed the case. Rep. Brad Sherman, D-CA, one of the original backers of Dodd-Frank, has crossed the partisan aisle in the House Financial Services Committee to join Rep. Steve Pearce, R-NM, in introducing H.R. 2213. Their bill would grant lenders a temporary safe harbor from enforcement of the rule integrating the required mortgage disclosures under the Truth in Lending Act and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. More specifically, H.R. 2213 would protect lenders from private lawsuits and regulatory enforcement actions through Dec. 31, 2015, ...