Compliance & Regulation

The Treasury Department on Wednesday unveiled three hires for key positions in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, including the naming of Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to be its first enforcement chief.

A new insurance product has been designed by Bakerjian Insurance Services “to protect lenders against potential damage” from repurchase demands from investors that may have originally been caused by fraudsters.

The American Bankers Association and six other industry trade groups are urging a U.S. district court in Detroit to reject a recent Department of Labor interpretative ruling that certain loan officers are entitled to overtime pay.

Legal actions tied to mortgage lending jumped by more than 40% in the third quarter based on the Mortgage Litigation Index report published this week.

The Senate Banking Committee Tuesday afternoon approved the nomination of Joseph Smith to be the next director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency by a 16-6 vote -- but several Republicans are planning to delay his confirmation by the full Senate.

With the government agency that dominates the reverse mortgage space working on moves to address the increase in tax and insurance default concerns there, some players may want to keep an eye on how these affect the market for this product.

New Jersey has become the 19th state to restrict the use of private transfer fees which require a percentage of a home's sales price be paid to a private third party each time the property is sold, often for up to 99 years.

The robo-signing fiasco has energized overall fraud prevention and management efforts prompting financial service providers to focus on short sales and foreclosure fraud.Compared to fraud, robo-signing mistakes that derive from carelessness and loan processing inefficiency are easier to detect and prevent. Insiders agree that fraudsters who often collaborate with employees of a mortgage firm tend to challenge both lenders and their borrowers with new scams that are becoming increasingly more complicated.

Ginnie Mae will join Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in requiring mortgages it purchases to be transmitted in the Uniform Loan Delivery Dataset standard — the set of data points and e-document formats the government-sponsored enterprises will mandate for all mortgages it purchases beginning Sept. 1, 2011.

Recent interest movement in Treasuries has narrowed their yield spread with real estate investment trusts, making some companies in the sector of publicly traded property and mortgage investment firms less attractive buys, according to Credit Suisse.