Capital markets

The agencies handed banks a significant victory when they finalized revisions to the Dodd-Frank proprietary trading ban, but officials also plan to re-propose changes to the “covered funds” section of the rule.

Blooma has developed a software product that combs databases to create property profiles for commercial real estate lenders. It can drastically cut origination costs and approval times and help banks identify safer loans, the company says.

Lower rates will likely sustain higher levels of origination through at least the third quarter, but supply constraints and economic weakness could limit the purchase market's response in the long term.

President Trump has signed the Protecting Affordable Mortgages for Veterans Act, which aims to address concerns that rules around certain VA refinances were impeding those loans' inclusion in secondary market pools.

Peter Antoszyk and David Hillman, co-heads of Proskauer Rose LLP’s private credit restructuring group, think the dry powder that investors have access to will help ease restructurings.

After the government-sponsored enterprise patch expires, "near prime" loans over the 43% debt-to-income ratio should be qualified mortgages if they have compensating factors, according to the Center for Responsible Lending.

In a downturn, some fintechs, such as independent lenders, will be more vulnerable to economic forces than those working to service banks' regulatory needs.

As officials prepare plans for the government-sponsored enterprises' exit from conservatorship, there's no shortage of speculation about what those plans might look like and how they might affect the mortgage industry.

The nonconforming market is ready to absorb most of the government-sponsored enterprise loans covered by the QM patch, but not all of them, according Redwood Trust.

Prepayments tied to repeated VA loan refinancing activity have had an adverse effect on Ginnie’s mortgage securities that persists despite countermeasures. The government bond issuer is making new plans to address the impact.

With prospects for government-sponsored enterprise reform improving, players in the private residential mortgage-backed securities market are starting to think about how they could better compete against the GSEs while awaiting change.

Investors can now exchange certain existing Freddie Mac bonds for to-be-announced uniform mortgage-backed securities in preparation for the full launch of UMBS next month.

Stonyrock Partners will focus on buying stakes in asset managers focused on middle-market strategies.

Urfer co-founded a business with the banking automation pioneer John Diebold, worked for Chase Manhattan and other major banks, and played an important role in the Nixon administration, phasing out exchange controls.

Freddie Mac exchanged existing bonds from its portfolio for mirror certificates for the first time, completing a key test that is central to the creation of a uniform mortgage-backed security.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, by allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to split the CEO and president positions, let the companies dodge a congressionally mandated cap on executive salaries, the regulator's inspector general said.

Seven years after James Gutierrez left Oportun Financial and started a competitor, the acrimony sparked by the divorce is coming into public view.

The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association approved changes to its good delivery guidelines that ease the path to the government-sponsored enterprises issuing uniform mortgage-backed securities starting on June 3.

Ginnie Mae could limit how much servicing income mortgage lenders can sell off through a transaction if they don't establish a minimum 25-basis-point spread at the portfolio level by next year.

Michael Bright is resigning as acting president of Ginnie Mae to run the Structured Finance Industry Group, a trade association that's been without a CEO since Richard Johns resigned in July amid a reported split with the group's board.