Clayton Holdings LLC and Detroit-based Maddin, Hauser, Wartell, Roth & Heller PC have announced a strategic partnership to offer readiness assessments for mortgage servicers to prepare for upcoming Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) examinations. Due to the rapidly changing mortgage servicing environment, including the CFPB’s release of its final rules for mortgage servicers in mid-January, mortgage servicers are confronting, and will continue to face, growing legal and operational challenges. The CFPB is aggressively enforcing existing law, and by 2014 the agency will seek to enforce new and more stringent rules through examinations that will evaluate compliance with strict legal and regulatory requirements, as well as the quality of the servicer’s operational systems, internal processes and procedures. Given the dual focus of the exams, Clayton and Maddin Hauser have created a group that combines regulatory and operational expertise to help servicers prepare for them.
“Clayton has a long history of providing insight to mortgage servicers through operational assessments and its RMBS surveillance,” said Bruce Legan, president of Clayton Consulting Services. “We’re excited to be able to combine Clayton’s deep operational knowledge of residential mortgage loan servicing with Maddin Hauser’s consumer law expertise to provide a top-tier offering to residential mortgage servicers in advance of a CFPB examination.”
Specifically, the group will:
►Assess a servicer’s compliance with federal consumer protection laws through loan-level file reviews, management interviews, work observations, and policy, procedure and documentation reviews.
►Use the assessment to help servicers prepare for CFPB examinations by evaluating and improving operational deficiencies that have been identified in their servicing platforms prior to the imposition of fines or other enforcement actions.
►Identify systemic problems to improve servicer performance over and above CFPB minimum requirements.
►Continually monitor changes in either the letter or interpretation of the law and advise clients to ensure compliance in a rapidly evolving environment.
"A Clayton/Maddin Hauser relationship provides a unique ‘value proposition’ for our servicer clients—combining extensive mortgage servicing expertise with a pragmatic and cost effective approach to assisting those clients in controlling their risk in an uncertain regulatory environment,” said Maddin Hauser’s Martin Frenkel, co-chair of the firm’s mortgage litigation and compliance group.
