Our compliance team is hard at work monitoring any developments at the federal and state level to provide you with the information and tools necessary to continue operations amid COVID-19. We are seeing updates at both the state and national level to accommodate difficulties in this time and are working continuously to ensure our guidance reflects the latest news.
March was a tumultuous month for all of us, as everyone across industries and even continents attempted to establish a new normal amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
Proponents of Remote Online Notarization (RON) have been touting its benefits, both to borrowers and the industry, for some time now. Now that the COVID-19 threat has led to social distancing requirements, there is increasing demand for a national standard to support RON to enable business continuity for lenders and financial institutions.
Have you ever stopped to consider how gradual major change truly is?
Sometimes, we don’t see how drastically something like the digital mortgage has evolved when we’re deep in the weeds every day. While it may seem that we have been talking about the digital mortgage evolution for a decade, when we take a step back, we see just how far the industry has come in its adoption of digital lending processes.
February brought the first major regulatory changes with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rolling out new the ARM regulations alluded to late last year. The GSEs announced plans for the gradual elimination (and replacement) of their ARM programs, which use LIBOR as the index for setting the adjustable interest rate. We have been working quickly to update documents but expect to see more changes and will alert you as more information becomes available.
In order to successfully introduce and deploy new technology, proactive change management is critical. As eClose adoption gains momentum, lenders who recognize the importance of laying the proper foundation early are experiencing positive adoption of this digital closing process. In collaboration with our partners at Simplifile, we have created a comprehensive guide for lenders interested in implementing eClose. Here are four key steps that every lender should consider. For a more comprehensive guide to implementing an eClose strategy, download, “E Closing: Lender Best Practices.”
One of the primary reasons mortgage lenders have been working to take their operations fully electronic is that paper is expensive. Storing it and then finding it later is extremely costly. And borrowers, for the most part, are tired of dealing with printed paper. For many lenders, the digital mortgage promises an end to paper and its expense.
Discover Home Equity Loans (Discover) is among the most innovative companies in the mortgage industry, and the six-year old mortgage arm of Discover Financial Services (NYSE: DFS) has outpaced home equity loan growth at other banks and credit unions, becoming the largest provider of closed-end second mortgages and growing to more than $1 billion in home equity loan balance in 2019.
This month’s changes were geared mainly toward document updates. In this post, you’ll find links to some of the work our experts were engaged in last month to keep our clients up to date and fully compliant. We bring you all the news in this month’s compliance update.
