The mortgage services division of IBM has taken control of roughly $47 billion in servicing rights from JPMorgan Chase and eventually may increase its contract with the megabank to $100 billion, industry officials close to the deal confirmed to National Mortgage News.
The transfer date on some of the servicing was October 1, officials confirmed.
At press time it was unclear whether IBM bought the servicing rights outright or whether it is acting as a subservicer on "high-touch" product that is ultimately owned by Fannie Mae.
A Chase spokesman declined to comment on the matter. Officials from IBM's servicing division — formerly known as Wilshire Credit Corp. — and Fannie Mae did not return telephone calls.
As reported by NMN recently, some commercial banks are beginning to grow weary of the MSR asset because of coming Basel III caps that put a limit on how much servicing rights can count toward capital.
Based in Oregon, IBM's servicing division is known as 'LBPS' which is short for Lender Business Process Services. A year ago IBM bought Wilshire from Bank of America, which inherited the servicing/subservicing platform when it acquired Merrill Lynch.
JPM inherited problem mortgage assets when it bought Washington Mutual of Seattle in late 2008, then the nation's largest thrift, which was saddled with billions of dollars in problem subprime and payment option ARMs.
