Servicing Newslinks Archive

“With anticipated increases in prepayment activity, we saw hits to servicing profitability resulting from mortgage servicing right markdowns and amortization. Nonetheless, the profitability on the production side of the business generally outweighed servicing losses.”–MBA Vice President of Industry Analysis Marina Walsh.

“Existing home sales make up approximately 90 percent of all home sales, which means existing homeowners must sell their homes in order for homes to be available for sale. Rising tenure length, therefore, means both fewer buyers and fewer homes on the market, keeping existing-home sales below potential.”–First American Chief Economist Mark Fleming.

“The unemployment rate remains quite low, but the national mortgage delinquency rate in the second quarter rose from both the first quarter and one year ago. The economy is slowing, and this poses the risk of further increases in delinquency rates.”–Marina Walsh, MBA Vice President of Industry Analysis.

“As you recall, MBA opposed the inclusion of the language preference question in the URLA because of the customer relations issues the question would cause if lenders could not actually serve borrowers in their preferred language, and due to unresolved operational and legal questions raised by the language preference information. We greatly appreciate Director Mark Calabria’s willingness to revisit these concerns and resolve them effectively.”–MBA President and CEO Bob Broeksmit, CMB, on an Aug. 8 announcement by the GSEs to delay implementation of the Uniform Residential Loan Application.

“S. 2155 was enacted to right-size regulations for community banks, mid-sized banks, regional banks and credit unions to expand access to capital. We have already started to see meaningful benefits from these laws…more can still be done to support the economic expansion.”–From a July 30 letter signed by nearly a dozen Republican senators to federal agencies, urging them to loosen regulations on banks and non-banks.

“The national mortgage market readjusting away from the Patch can facilitate a more transparent, level playing field that ultimately benefits consumers through stronger consumer protection.”–Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Kathleen Kraninger.

“Today’s announcement is not the end of our efforts to make sure consumers’ sensitive personal information is safe and secure. The incident at Equifax underscores the evolving cyber security threats confronting both private and government computer systems and actions they must take to shield the personal information of consumers. Too much is at stake for the financial security of the American people to make these protections anything less than a top priority.”–Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Kathy Kraninger.

“At a high level, the role of federal regulators with respect to credit scoring models should be to ensure such models exceed a minimum threshold of predictive capacity, while also remaining in compliance with fair lending requirements. If the CFPB or any other regulator was able to regularly change the weighting of various model inputs, or remove certain inputs altogether, the predictive capacity of the models could be seriously jeopardized. Such actions would then result in less sustainable mortgage lending, which would harm the very consumers that policymakers and market participants are attempting to better serve.” –MBA Senior Vice President Bill Killmer, in a letter to House Financial Services Committee leadership expressing concerns with provisions in the Clarity in Credit Score Formation Act of 2019.

“FHA can make changes to expand loan eligibility and encourage more servicer and investor participation.”–From an MBA/American Bankers Association letter to HUD outlining recommendations to improve its FHA Single-Family Loan Sale Program.

“The importance of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 and subsequent reauthorizations to the American economy is directly relevant to MBA’s membership. A long-term extension of TRIA is vital to the health of the commercial and multifamily real estate finance sector and the nation as a whole.”–MBA Senior Vice President of Legislative and Political Affairs Bill Killmer, in a letter to Senate Banking Committee leadership in support of reauthorization of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act.