In early 2008, with the industry entering a meltdown that made most nightmares serene, a troubling trend emerged. It was the feature of cover story of the issue of Broker Magazine that discussed various methods of credit restoration and improvement. With the mortgage marketplace drastically changing over the past year, it was easy to understand the increased awareness in the maximization of a consumer’s credit score in an attempt to salvage every loan, and make some extra income to boot.Read more

Effective April 1, 2010 mortgage brokers and mortgage net branch companies will have new requirements to fulfill before they sign up with a credit reporting agency to access credit reports. All mortgage brokers and net branch companies with access to mortgage credit reports that contain Experian credit data (which is currently all credit reports for mortgage purposes due to the repositories’ own requirements) will need to be re-valuated by their current credit report provider to assure compliance with the new requirements. This is mandatory to continue to receive credit reports.Read more

On Dec. 22, 2009, more than six years since President George W. Bush signed into law the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 (FACTA), the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the final rules that require creditors to provide consumers with a notice when they have been charged more for credit based on their credit score. The final rules implemented in FACTA amends the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the primary federal law that governs the use of credit reports.Read more

According to a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaint filed in December 2008, Gregory Navone, a mortgage broker from Las Vegas improperly disposed of about 40 boxes of sensitive consumer records collected by companies he had owned, including tax returns, mortgage applications, bank statements, photocopies of credit cards and drivers’ licenses, and at least 230 credit reports.Read more

PClender.com Inc. has announced the availability of its Compliance Requirements Summary matrix to assist the lending community with a comprehensive plan for managing current and future regulatory changes with confidence. The free document is available for download andRead more

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that it is lowering from $11 to $10.50 the maximum amount that consumer reporting agencies are allowed to charge consumers for an extra copy of their credit report. The Commission announced the reduction in the amount from 2009 to 2010 under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which requires the FTC each year to revise the cap originally set by statute based on the change in the Consumer Price Index. The fee is rounded to the nearest .50 cents.Read more

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) has announced the promotions of two employees to associate vice president and three employees to director. The two new associate vice presidents are Shelley Reback and Michael Sorohan. The three new directors are Teressa Jefferies, Masuda Ranjber and Alicia Roundy.Read more

The sale and use of mortgage trigger leads has successfully cleared another legal challenge recently, when the Second Circuit Court upheld the prior decision to dismiss a challenge to the practice by Premium Mortgage Corporation of Rochester, N.Y. This comes after the three national credit bureaus, lead by their trade association, the Consumer Data Industry Association (CDIA), successfully filed a lawsuit against the Minnesota Attorney General to stop a Minnesota law that would have effectively banned the practice in July of 2007.Read more

The Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) is on the way and its gestation stage will not be as long as many expect.¹ Although its nascence will endure the inevitable crucible of politics churned out by the Congress, federal and state regulatory bodies, bank and non-bank industry lobbyists, and eminent legal scholars,² the actors in this drama seem to argue, at one extreme, for a CFPA with robust oversight and regulatory enforcement authorities, and, at the other extreme, some kind of oversight agency that reviRead more

Experian, a global information services company, has announced its suite of leading “ability to pay” products—Income Insight and Income View—designed to be the definitive source for determining consumers’ ability to pay. Income Insight is a unique product designed to support recent legislation by providing an estimate of a borrower’s individual income utilizing verified income data and proprietary credit bureau attributes.Read more