MetLife Inc. agreed to pay $123.5 million to resolve a U.S. probe into shoddy loans at a discontinued mortgage unit.

Panelists at the MBA's mortgage servicing conference said that the best way for servicers to keep federal regulators off their backs is to be responsive consumer complaints. And if a state attorney general or regulator come knocking, it’s best to be responsive and cooperative.

The Mortgage Bankers Association's annual servicing conference opened with a plea from Quicken Loans CEO Bill Emerson for executives to remember their duty beyond collecting loan payments from borrowers.

The heightened regulatory environment for servicers has also prompted a wave of process improvements.

Mortgage technology firm ISGN has released its latest loan servicing system, LoanDynamix, which boasts a strong focus on compliance.

Analytics provider CoreLogic has designed a suite of new tools aimed at helping loan servicers provide servicemember customers with the benefits they are entitled to.

It's not quite too big to fail, but Ocwen is the country's largest servicer of subprime mortgages. So if it were forced to sell itself, or even failed, the transfer of some $410 billion in servicing rights could create havoc in the mortgage market, industry experts said.

Ocwen Financial has tentatively agreed to sell a mortgage-servicing portfolio on $9.8 billion of loans to Nationstar Mortgage Holdings, and Ocwen hinted that more deals may be in the offing.

Three more people from the Charlotte region have been sentenced as part of a sprawling mortgage and investment fraud investigation.

While many servicers are under pressure to sell of mortgage servicing rights, there's still a fair amount of interest in buying MSRs from other quarters of the market.

CFPB officials are keeping a close watch on the Qualified Mortgage and ability-to-repay rules to gauge whether further changes should be made. But mortgage numbers don't give a clear picture on what kind of impact they've had.

Here's a preview of some of the most interesting and important presentations scheduled at this year's MBA Servicing Conference, as selected by the editors of National Mortgage News.

The independent monitor overseeing Bank of America's compliance with requirements of its landmark mortgage settlement agreement has released his first report on the bank's consumer relief activities.

Consulting firm Teraverde Management Advisors has formed a new business unit to help clients grapple with their compliance requirements.

To take advantage of changing customer demographics and preferences, lenders must capitalize on digital technology. At the same time, digital technology should work in conjunction with, not as a replacement for, the loan officer.

Foreclosures and delinquencies may seem like problems from the past, but servicers are still struggling with a massive backlog of distressed loans and a return to normalcy is at least two years away, if not longer.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who forced Wall Street's biggest banks to pay billions in fines for their roles in the subprime mortgage crisis, is pressing for action against executives at those firms, even as he prepares to leave his post.

The North Texas region has been a hub for mortgage servicing for decades, dating back to the oil bust and savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Today, some key players and many smaller ones remain firmly entrenched in the area.

They're called "zombie properties" — dilapidated, abandoned and overgrown with weeds because the lending institutions inheriting them through foreclosure fail to maintain them.

Users of Ellie Mae's self-hosted loan origination system will soon have to make a choice: migrate to the software-as-a-service version of Encompass or switch technology providers altogether.