LoanCare faces amended class action over prepayments

Mortgage borrowers have filed an amended class action lawsuit related to the way a subservicer reportedly handled their prepayments following a court's partial denial and dismissal of their earlier court filing. The new U.S. District Court filing alleges nonbank LoanCare misapplied funds and charged unnecessary interest while aiming to address concerns about a lack of specificity in the earlier one. At issue in the amended lawsuit that plaintiffs Gary and Lisa Tederick filed are 16 prepayments of $300 to $1,500 each that LoanCare handled for a mortgage on their home in West Virginia after it began working with their servicer, RoundPoint, starting "on or around" April 1, 2019. The handling of the funds was out of step with servicing rules for their Fannie Mae loan, the plaintiffs alleged.

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Union Home Mortgage sues rival for alleged trade secrets theft

Union Home Mortgage is suing an Ohio rival over its trade secrets, pinning the theft on two former employees. The lender names Go Mortgage along with Nicholas Capretta and Morgan Roderick as defendants in the case filed last week in an Ohio federal court. Capretta, a former area sales manager at UHM, is listed as Go's current vice president of retail sales, while Roderick remains in a loan officer role in Columbus, Ohio. Roderick sent confidential company information to his personal email account in September before resigning, the complaint alleges.?

Delinquency rates are back on the rise

In September, the mortgage delinquency rate took its biggest leap in over two years, according to ICE Mortgage Technology. The nationwide delinquency rate surged 13 basis points on an annual basis — the largest upswing since mid-2021 — to 3.29% of total servicing volume, the technology and data provider said in its first-look report this week. The share, which comes out to approximately 1.75 million mortgages, was also up month over month by 12 basis points, as loan performance showed continued signs of deterioration across all stages.?

Community Reinvestment Act rule finally crosses the finish line

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System voted to issue a final rule revamping the Community Reinvestment Act Tuesday morning, redefining the criteria for small, intermediate and large banks; introducing new evaluation tests based on loan activity rather than branch location; and incentivizing banks to conduct more community development activities. The new rule, jointly released by the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2026. The final rule redefines the asset size thresholds and methods with which regulators evaluate lenders.?

How data sharing could change under CFPB's proposed new rules

U.S. banks have shared their customers' account data with fintechs, an activity some call "open banking," for more than a decade. But they haven't always done it knowingly or willingly, and it's been a source of tension among banks, data aggregators and fintechs. Could the data-sharing rules the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau proposed last week make a difference? The CFPB's proposed data-sharing rules say banks must share transaction data for deposit and card accounts with fintechs at customers' request. Banks would have to provide at least 24 months of historical transaction data and information about upcoming payments. They also would have to provide interfaces developers can use to create pipelines that receive this data.

20 banks with the most subservicing in Q2

The top five residential servicers in the list have a combined unpaid principal balance of more than $1.89 trillion at the end of the second quarter of 2023. Many servicers saw a small increase between Q1 and Q2, with the highest being a rise of 7.46%. The data in this ranking came from National Mortgage News' MortgageStats site, which pulls information from quarterly call reports available from the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. Read on to see which residential servicers are in the top 20 and how they fared through the end of June 2023.

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