15Jan

CFPB issues statement on providing financial products and services to LEP consumers

January 15, 2021 Ballard Spahr

In a development welcomed by industry members, the CFPB published today a “Statement Regarding the Provision of Financial Products and Services to Consumers with Limited English Proficiency.” The Statement is intended to provide “compliance principles and guidelines to inform and assist financial institutions in their decision making related to serving LEP consumers.”

The Statement is divided into two sections. One section contains “guiding principles for serving LEP consumers.” These principles consist of the following:

The Bureau encourages financial institutions to better serve LEP consumers while ensuring compliance with relevant federal, state, and other legal requirements.
Financial institutions that wish to implement pilot programs or other phased approaches for offering LEP-consumer-focused products can consider doing so consistent with the Statement’s guidelines.
Financial institutions can consider developing a variety of compliance approaches related to providing products and services to LEP consumers consistent with the Statement’s guidelines.
Financial institutions can mitigate certain compliance risks by providing LEP consumers with “clear and timely” disclosures in non-English languages describing the “extent and limits” of any language services provided throughout the product lifecycle.
Financial institutions may wish to consider extending credit pursuant to a legally compliant special purpose credit program to increase credit access for certain underserved LEP consumers.

08Jan

Grow Your Business with a Real Estate Investor Channel

January 8, 2021 Civic Financial Services

The mortgage world is a feast or famine business. And with today’s refi boom most originators’ bellies are full. But if you’re looking ahead at what your next big opportunity is in 2021, you don’t have to look further than an investment real estate channel.

15 to 20 percent of a typical originator’s prospect database is a potential investor who may need a private money loan to buy an investment property as a rental or fix and flip a property in today’s hot market. Also, investors are often real estate agents, which makes them a great source for future business.

Why Private Money Lending?

Make no mistake, interest in private money loans – once considered ‘hard money’ loans – is growing.

The private lending industry currently accounts for $50 to 60 billion in originations and growing. Institutional capital from Wall Street is pouring into this space, making it very lucrative due to it’s high yield and measured risk. Conventional lenders and mortgage brokers are aligning themselves with trusted private money lending partners because they understand the value of serving investors.

The average borrower on a primary residence gets a new mortgage every four years and refi’s a time or two. The average real estate investor, finances four or more properties every year. More experienced investors purchase a dozen or more annually.

Because they are based on the “hard” asset, rather than the borrower’s qualifications, a key benefit of private money loans is that they are considered “business purpose loans”. There’s no TRID or difficult consumer regulations, so they typically close in 7-10 days, enabling borrowers to compete with cash buyers on lucrative deals or in competitive markets.

Best of all, it’s easy to add private money loan options to your current lending portfolio as they are much less complex and challenging than conventional mortgages. Even those brokers with no experience with private money loans can learn to qualify customers in no time.

How to Select a Private Lender

When surveying the market of private money lenders to partner with, it’s important to know how strong and stable their business is. The pandemic shook up the private money industry significantly. At the onset, many lenders were over-leveraged, and when warehouse lines dried up and institutional investors paused, margin calls ensued. Many private lenders paused or shuttered entirely. Only the strongest, best-capitalized lenders continued lending uninterrupted and prevailed.

To protect yourself and your clients, identify your private lender’s capital source. Are they lending their own money, using bank lines or brokering? Ensure they have an uninterrupted track record of funding loans as well as the strength and capacity to meet financial commitments and adapt to change.

Check out their loan product offerings and ensure their loan options and pricing is clear. To succeed in this space, you will need products for short term Bridge loans, long term loans for rental properties and financing solutions to cover full rehab and construction costs. Credible lenders understand each unique scenario and offer loan options to meet individual needs. True capital partners are problem solvers.

Your Trusted Lending Partner™

CIVIC Financial Services is a leading institutional private lender. With CIVIC as your capital partner, you can serve grow your business and serve customers throughout their entire real estate journey – purchase, refi, fix and flip or long-term rental.

In 2020, CIVIC onboarded more than 600 Brokers to its Wholesale Channel and added several Correspondent Partners. In spite of the pandemic challenges, CIVIC funded more than $1B in loans in 2020, bringing funding volume since their founding in 2014 to more than 10,000 loans and over $4.3B

To be sure, the mortgage business is a feast or famine market, and this certainly isn’t the time to take up golf. For opportunistic originators, there is always more on the menu than there appears – and a Private Money Lending partner might be the most rewarding meal of all.

Check out this video interview with CIVIC’s president William Tessar and download CIVIC’s free guide ‘Keys to Success in a Post Refi World’ at https://www.civicfs.com/cmba

22Dec

10 Proven Ways Banks Can Deliver More With a Mortgage POS

December 22, 2020 BeSmartee

Analyzing the proven benefits a Mortgage POS can bring to your bank.

Technology is constantly changing the mortgage industry, making it easier for lenders to work with their customers and guide them through the origination process on a digital channel. One of these tools is the mortgage point-of-sale (POS) platform.

The right mortgage POS platform can allow banks to effectively communicate with their customers and provide them with the necessary information and documentation to validate data and complete their mortgage loan application. By accessing a web-based dashboard, borrowers can upload documents, communicate with their lender, and track the progress of their application.

Let’s examine 10 proven ways banks can benefit from the right mortgage POS platform.

1. Improve the Borrower Experience

The digital mortgage is all about the customer experience and it begins at the point-of-sale.

The results from a 2019 survey conducted by McKinsey & Company of 1,200 residential mortgage customers showed that there’s plenty of room for improvement in customer satisfaction. Findings showed that superb customer experience was as important as getting the best rate. First-time home buyers said they relied on online reviews and word of mouth to learn more about how well the bank worked with their borrowers to deliver an exceptional experience.

02Dec

Insellerate Launches DATA IE™ Solution

December 2, 2020 Insellerate

Newport Beach, CA – December 2nd, 2020 – Insellerate, the leading mortgage Customer Experience Platform featuring Lead Management, CRM & Engagement that helps lenders close more loans by increasing efficiency gains across sales, marketing, operations management, announces the release of its DATA IE solution.

This innovative solution allows lenders to better serve their customers by quickly turning borrower data into actionable insights and intelligent engagement. DATA IE delivers powerful data insights, leverages that data to enhance borrower engagement, and provides personalized outreach to enhance borrower relationships while delivering timely messaging throughout the borrower journey.

“It is critical to provide lenders with actionable data insights that provide a truly personal and engaging customer experience,” said Josh Friend, CEO of Insellerate. “We understand the desire of lenders to better serve their customers, which is why we continue to deliver innovative solutions to allow lenders to do just that.”

Insellerate’s dynamic DATA IE solution enables loan officers to craft the right message at the right time with the right offer through the power of intelligent data and engagement. This delivers timelier and more personalized engagement, enhanced borrower retention, and higher conversions.

Built by mortgage professionals, the Insellerate Customer Experience Platform has full CRM & Engagement functionality with built-in lead management and automated marketing, now enhanced with actionable data insights. Lenders can improve both the borrower and loan officer experience with multi-channel communication, leveraging tools such as phone, SMS text messaging, email, direct mail, and customer monitoring-anytime, anywhere.

19Nov

The Three Biggest Factors Standing Between You and Lifelong Customers

November 19, 2020 Top of Mind

When Top of Mind made it our mission to help lenders keep clients for life — almost two decades ago! — the words weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today. Nowadays, “client for life” and its proxies (“lifelong customers,” etc.) are used by countless mortgage lenders, service providers and even Top of Mind competitors to describe the ideal relationship between originator and borrower.

We consider it a compliment that these phrases are so widely used, but we want to clarify what we mean when we talk about clients for life — and how to cultivate them.

What It Means

For loan originators, earning lifelong clients is a career goal. Most loan officers and brokers aspire to reach a point where they can quit hustling for new leads and live off repeat and referral business.

For mortgage executives, lifelong clients mean bigger profit margins. Acquiring a new customer costs more than hanging on to an existing one — a lot more. Studies have clocked the cost of customer acquisition at anywhere from five to seven times the cost of customer retention.

For American consumers, being a lifelong client means choosing to work with the same lender across an average of seven lifetime mortgages. If we assume that originators earn an average commission of $2,500 per loan[2] — and plenty of you have LOs who net more than that — we can approximate the lifetime value of a mortgage client at $17,500. And that doesn’t even take referrals into account!

17Nov

3 Reasons Why Omnichannel Contact Centers are Critical for Modern Lenders

November 17, 2020 Sourcepoint

Today’s borrowers expect the same speed, convenience and personalization from their lenders and servicers as they are used to with leading retailers such as Amazon and Apple. As digital technologies enable customers to engage with lenders over multiple channels, contact centers are fast becoming a critical component in a lender’s ability to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Here’s how.

12Nov

What Data Insights Do Mortgage Lenders Need Right Now?

November 12, 2020 LBA Ware

The novel coronavirus outbreak has tested lenders’ ability to adapt to sudden, monumental change. Branch managers are grappling with an influx of record-high refi volume and lack of staff capacity all while transitioning to a remote business model. Instant data insights and concise communication are now more important than ever to keep employees connected, on track, and of course, motivated.

To absorb as much refi business as possible while keeping consumers happy, branch managers will need to go “back to basics” in their evaluation of operations and production data.

Here are three real-time data analytics branch managers can use to keep themselves out of the weeds and ensure the entire branch is on the same page.

1. Pull-Through and Fallout

Pull-through and fallout data are essential to helping branch managers identify where they are losing business, why it’s happening and what steps they can take to prevent future losses. Take, for instance, a common lender predicament in our current market: volume is high, but fallout has increased. A branch manager who’s satisfied to simply attribute unusually high fallout to an increased rate shopping market and wash their hands of it could be losing a large swath of good loans.

30Oct

TRID Turns 5: What We’ve Learned About Successfully Managing Mortgage Origination Compliance

October 30, 2020 MetaSource

MetaSource

Five years ago, big changes to federal requirements for the mortgage loan disclosure processes produced great anxiety in the lending world. Lenders feared they were facing an onslaught of complicated, new compliance demands that would inflate the cost and risks of every loan origination and leave them perpetually at risk of penalties.

The TILA- RESPA Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rules were instituted in late 2015 and administered by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. TRID consolidated four existing disclosures required under TILA and RESPA for closed-end credit transactions secured by real property into two forms:

The Loan Estimate (LE) replaced the Good Faith Estimate (GFE) and initial Truth-in-Lending Disclosure, which are provided to consumers at the start of the transaction and include both initial disclosures and timing restrictions (must be provided within 3 business days from the date the application is received)
The Closing Disclosure (CD) replaced the HUD-1 Settlement Statement and final Truth-in-Lending Disclosure, providing consumers the required 3 days to review all final terms and conditions and seeking to prevent borrowers from signing documents under duress

Lenders’ anxiety around these new rules was based on the lack of clear guidance from the CFPB, the myriad interpretations by varying investors, and potential penalties associated with non-compliance.

10Sep

Financial Statement Reporting for Proceeds from PPP Loans

September 10, 2020 Spiegel Accountancy Corp.

Spiegel Accountancy Corp.

History of the Paycheck Protection Program

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act provided an estimated $2.2 trillion to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and stimulate the US economy, including $349 billion that was earmarked for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to be administered by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA). An additional $310 billion was later authorized for the PPP.

Under the PPP, eligible businesses can apply to an SBA-approved lender for a loan that does not require collateral or personal guarantees. The loans have a 1% fixed interest rate and are due in two years. However, these loans are eligible for forgiveness (in full or in part, including any accrued interest) under certain conditions. For loans (or parts of loans) that are forgiven, the lender will collect the forgiven amount from the U.S. government. A recent bill has extended the repayment term to five years for any portion of the loan not forgiven.

28Aug

CFPB Readiness, Audit Preparedness

August 28, 2020 The Compliance Group

The Content of an Audit

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau conducts regular audits to ensure that financial institutions come into and maintain compliance with the new mortgage rules. Those rules are according to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act) and amend several existing regulations, including Regulation Z, X, and B. Our CFPB Readiness Audit Services assist our clients in preparing for this review.

The CFPB maintains content and updates to these rules as well as their official interpretations on the CFPB compliance/guidance page. While being prepared is essential, the right partner can provide a well-versed view of the rules and their interpretations, activities, and information to assist preparation.