Compliance

Legal Battles Took a Toll on JPMorgan Chase, but CEO Jamie Dimon is now urging investors to focus on the future. Among his top initiatives for 2014: making the most of big data and strengthening cybersecurity.

The Michigan company has pledged $1 million to help people buy homes in the Marygrove College neighborhood. Homeowners can get up to $25,000 and have $5,000 shaved off the balance each year they live there.

The USDA's Rural Housing Service is seeking congressional approve for a lender-funded update to its loan-guarantee program that will speed up loan processing.

Freddie Mac will soon add another automated review on the appraisal reports it receives through the Uniform Collateral Data Portal.

Bank of America Corp.'s Countrywide unit and insurer Allstate Corp. settled a 2010 lawsuit over $700 million in devalued mortgage-backed securities.

Disclosing loan-level data is crucial to rebuilding investor confidence in mortgage-backed securities. It also introduces the risk of compromising borrowers' personal information.

CoreLogic has agreed to add Equifax's the Work Number platform to Credco, its verification-of-employment service.

Stewart Title Co. has acquired quality control firm Wetzel Trott in a move to expand its origination and servicing audit and due diligence services.

Efforts to overhaul the housing-finance system could hinge on how far Congress is willing to go to ensure that young, low-income and minority homebuyers can get mortgages.

Citigroup Inc. agreed to pay $1.13 billion to settle claims from mortgage-bond investors as it seeks to curb liabilities tied to the financial crisis.

Prospective homeowners are increasingly more optimistic, with 38% of respondents to Fannie Mae's March 2014 National Housing Survey saying it is a good time to sell a home, compared to 26% a year ago.

After slogging through several quarters of high expenses and shrinking profits, some lenders are now selling mortgage servicing rights to raise cash to cover payroll and expenses, industry sources say.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau prohibits actions aimed at circumventing loan officer compensation rules. One example was a lender who permitted teams of LOs to share commissions.

Housing market trends continue to show improvement in February as housing prices stabilize and foreclosure starts decrease to 2005 levels, according to the March installment of the Obama administration's Housing Scorecard.

Unlicensed loan processor gets over six years in federal prison for his actions.

While distributed denial-of-service attacks typically crash systems with waves of invalid data requests, the manner in which Ellie Mae's technology was overwhelmed suggests the culprits were familiar with the mortgage business.

The CFPB report for full year 2013 shows that there were over 160,000 complaints to the bureau from homeowners, of which 60,000 were complaints about the mortgage process.

A U.S. magistrate judge in North Carolina dealt a blow to government efforts to use the 1980s-era Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act to penalize big banks, but many experts say the decision—which is not binding—may just be a temporary glitch.

The Mortgage Bankers Association urged the Senate and House finance committees to pass the Expiring Provisions Improvement Reform and Efficiency Act, saying the bill contains "several critical provisions" for real estate financing markets and the economic recovery.

New rules should protect the FHA from losses on reverse mortgages and make prepayments more predictable for bond investors, but they also slow the production of loans available for securitization.