The Nationwide Multistate Licensing System received an update last month to better reflect a policy change and
NMLS, which provides services to 600,000 users across the financial services industry, made changes to disclosure questions and the employment history reporting process on April 18, the Conference of State Bank Supervisors announced Wednesday in a press release. Both align with the CSBS' efforts to improve the NMLS user experience and come as a
As part of the changes, all individuals, including mortgage loan originators, who file the MU4 or MU2 forms as part of the licensing process are required to update their form in NMLS by completing the revised disclosure questions. The changes include clearer and revamped questions, more response options to ensure accuracy and updated requirements for criminal, regulatory and financial disclosures, the release said.
Those impacted by this change should review and complete the updates by August 31 to prepare for next year's NMLA annual renewal period. Failure to do so may result in delayed filings or compliance issues during renewal, according to the release.
"It's probably been five to seven years since we made any change to the disclosure questions, and prior to that I don't think we had made any changes," Dave Dwyer, senior vice president of business services at CSBS, told National Mortgage News. "It was done with a lot of discussion around when and how this would be done. ... We picked a time that was well in advance of renewal."
Prior to April 18, users filled out their own employment history in NMLS when completing individual forms, such as MU4 and MU2. Now, an MLO's relationship with a company in NMLS will automatically show up in the employment history section of all individual forms in the system, meaning users no longer have to fill out this information themselves.
Individuals will also select their employers from a list of options, as opposed to writing in a company name, which can lead to inaccuracies, CSBS said.
This change allows employment information to be entered once and reused, rather than being reentered and maintained separately by individuals and companies. It also eliminates issues relating to duplicate data entry, differing employment records and confusion about who should update employment information, the release said.
As a result of the enhancement, company users are required to enter employees' job title, work phone and work email when completing the company relationship information for individuals.
A bug was also found and fixed where a company user was unable to add a relationship if the individual was fully remote but not yet associated with a license.
The NMLS team created a series of live training sessions to help impacted users adjust to the changes as well.
"This is going to come for company users as well, probably sometime next year," Dwyer said. "We're going to continue to roll out enhancements to NMLS to modernize the system and address pain points that have been identified by the industry and agency users. ... We have a road map out to 2029."
More than 158,000 individuals requested to
