Risk management

Several civil rights and community development groups wrote Tuesday to urge the Federal Housing Finance Agency to recapitalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The CFPB alleges that David Eghbali, a loan officer for a Wells Fargo branch in Beverly Hills, Calif., developed a scheme to manipulate escrow fees in order to close more mortgages and boost his bonus. Eghbali says he was forced to sign a settlement because he couldn't afford to fight the CFPB in court.

The Inspector General for the Department of Housing and Urban Development is not backing down on his concerns about premium pricing associated with the down payment assistance programs by the Federal Housing Administration.

The bank's new low-down-payment mortgage, an alternative to FHA loans, dispenses with the complex qualification requirements that have hampered recent efforts with low down payments by Fannie and Freddie.

New research findings challenge common assumptions about borrower behavior, illustrating how trended data — something mortgage lenders will soon be required to collect — could be a game-changer.

The secondary marketing agency wants to model how servicers' available cash might stand up to shocks because interruptions to that liquidity have been a common problem among those that failed.

Now that it has the green light to expand its role in multifamily housing, Freddie Mac is looking at more ways to shift the credit risk on apartment building mortgages that it insures.

Two recent court rulings affirmed that lenders can enforce electronically signed and transferred notes, laying important groundwork for wider adoption of electronic mortgage technology that could improve the customer experience for borrowers and save lenders and servicers a bundle.

The experience of updating systems and overhauling workflows that mortgage lenders gleaned from implementing the TILA-RESPA integrated disclosures could prove useful to portfolio lenders as they implement a similarly complex accounting rule for reporting credit losses.

The Indianapolis Federal Home Loan Bank rewarded 43 of its members with a $761,000 payout in May for the performance of their mortgages in an aggregated pool.