Mortgage banking appeared to become somewhat more profitable during the first quarter of 2015, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of earnings reports filed by a diverse group of 19 publicly-traded companies. The group – all but one of them banks – reported a total of $3.496 billion in mortgage banking income during the first quarter. That was up 10.2 percent from the end of last year. It also represented a 23.0 percent increase over the first quarter of 2014, one of the ...