CFPB Focuses on Mortgage Servicers With Proposed New Regulations

It’s not just collection agencies that are the focus of the (still sort of new) Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s scrutiny. According to a story running in the Wall Street Journal, banks and other firms that collect payments from mortgage borrowers and handle their defaults are also on the agency’s “Checking it Twice” list.

It’s rumored that the CFPB may soon require mortgage servicers to “reach out aggressively,” in the words of the WSJ piece, to delinquent mortgage holders in order to warn them of pending interest-rate changes. There is also talk of applying monthly payments the same day.

The proposed changes — if they’re accepted — won’t go into effect until 2013. In fact, they haven’t even been formally proposed yet. That’ll come this summer, followed by a lengthy season of comment-gathering before the eventual rules are unveiled sometime after January.

A breakdown of some of the proposed regulations follow:

• Mortgage servicers would provide clear monthly mortgage statements
• Mortgage statements would contain a detailed breakdown of payments
• Mortgage statements would contain alerts about how to get help if the borrower is falling into trouble
• Borrowers would receive an estimate of when a mortgage will reset at a higher interest rate and an estimate of the resulting monthly payment