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Top Story Lending Related

03/05/2024

SBA updates Lender Match tool for small businesses

Yesterday, SBA Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman announced the next generation of the SBA’s Lender Match tool for businesses to connect to capital through SBA’s network of approved banks and private lenders. The enhanced Lender Match will provide Americans seeking funding to start and grow their businesses with a simple, online tool that will more effectively match them with the SBA’s competitive lending products and additional offerings from a trusted network of banks and private lenders.

On the enhanced Lender Match platform, small business owners benefit from an improved, mobile-first user interface that ensures better access and usability. Borrowers will now be able to easily view all of their matched lenders in one place, allowing the borrower to find and compare lenders to help them decide where to apply for a loan. The enhanced tool will also verify borrowers and screen for fraud to streamline the process for both lenders and borrowers. Importantly, with Lender Match, small businesses that are not matched to lenders will be connected to the SBA’s local network of free advisors to help them get capital-ready.

03/05/2024

CFPB finalizes rule reducing credit card late fees to $8 for larger issuers

This morning, the CFPB announced it has finalized a rule to cut excessive credit card late fees. The rule will curb fees that cost American families more than $14 billion a year. The CFPB estimates that American families will save more than $10 billion in late fees annually once the final rule goes into effect by reducing the typical fee from $32 to $8 for card issuers that together with their affiliates have one million or more open credit card accounts.

The final rule reduces the current maximum late fees from $30 for the first late payment and $41 for subsequent late payments to $8 and ends automatic inflation adjustments for that amount for issuers that have one million or more open accounts. Specifically, the final rule:

  • Lowers the immunity provision dollar amount for late fees to $8
  • Ends the automatic annual inflation adjustment. The CFPB will instead monitor market conditions and adjust the $8 late fee immunity threshold as necessary.
  • Requires credit card issuers to show their math. Larger card issuers will be able to charge fees above the threshold so long as they can prove the higher fee is necessary to cover their actual collection costs.

The rule does not change the credit card issuer’s ability to raise interest rates, reduce credit lines, and take other actions to deter consumers from paying late.

The final rule does not adopt these revisions for “Smaller Card Issuers” (i.e., card issuers that together with their affiliates had fewer than one million open credit card accounts for the entire preceding calendar year). For Smaller Card Issuers, the final rule revises the safe harbor threshold amounts for late fees to $32 for the initial violation and $43 for each subsequent violation that occurs in one of the next six billing cycles.

The effective date of the final rule will be 60 days after publication of the rule in the Federal Register.

  • Statement of CFPB Director Rohit Chopra
  • Executive summary
  • Key changes chart
  • Unofficial redline of the final rule
  • UPDATE:Updated 3/5/2024 to clarify that the reduced fee cap applies only to larger card issuers
  • PUBLICATION AND EFFECTIVE DATE UPDATE: Published at 89 FR 19128 on 3/15/2024, with an effective date of 5/14/2024. However, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has filed a suit in the Northern District of Texas seeing a preliminary injunction to stop the CFPB from implementing the rule.

03/05/2024

FDIC issues list of recently released CRA evaluation ratings

The FDIC has released a list of 56 recently released CRA evaluation ratings of state non-member FDIC-insured financial institutions. Three banks (located in Camden, SC; Doylestown, PA; and Sewell, NJ) were assigned "Needs to Improve" ratings. Forty-six received "Satisfactory" ratings. We congratulation seven institutions whose evaluations were rated "Outstanding":

03/04/2024

OCC releases CRA evaluations for 31 banks

The OCC has released a list of Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) performance evaluations that became public in February. Of the 31 evaluations made public this month, one (in Kentland, Indiana) is rated needs to improve, 24 are rated satisfactory, and the following six are rated outstanding:

03/01/2024

Updated plan for implementation of Enterprise credit score requirements

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has announced updates to the implementation of new credit score requirements for single-family loans acquired by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises).

The FHFA is aligning the implementation date of the bi-merge credit reporting requirement with the transition from the Classic FICO credit score model. This aligned transition is expected to occur in the fourth quarter of 2025.

To better support market participants with this transition, the Enterprises will accelerate the publication of VantageScore 4.0 historical data, originally expected to be published in the first quarter of 2025, to early in the third quarter of 2024. FHFA and the Enterprises continue to work towards providing similar data to support the transition to the FICO 10T model, contingent upon achieving the necessary conditions for acquisition and publication of this data. FHFA will provide further details on implementation timing for FICO 10T once this process is complete.

03/01/2024

Agencies to host 2024 interagency Community Reinvestment Conference

The FDIC, Federal Reserve Board, and OCC have jointly announced they and the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco and Chicago will host the 2024 National Interagency Community Reinvestment Conference in Portland, Oregon, March 4 to 7.

The biennial conference offers participants the opportunity to learn about the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) and to discuss best practices, innovations, and emerging challenges in community development with experts from around the country. The 2024 program will focus on the agencies’ new CRA rule, and will include regulator-led sessions on the rule and panels on community development policy and activities. There will be pre-conference tours of local community development organizations and projects.

The conference will also include a panel discussion with Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michael J. Barr, FDIC Chairman Martin J. Gruenberg, and Acting Comptroller of the Currency Michael J. Hsu. The panel discussion will be livestreamed.

To register for the conference and view the full agenda, visit the National Interagency Community Reinvestment Conference website.

03/01/2024

OCC and FDIC release CRA evaluation schedules

The FDIC and OCC have issued their Community Reinvestment Act examination schedules for the second and third quarters of 2024.

02/28/2024

House prices continue to climb

The Federal Housing Finance Agency reported yesterday that U.S. house prices rose 6.5 percent between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the fourth quarter of 2023, according to the FHFA House Price Index. House prices were up 1.5 percent compared to the third quarter of 2023. FHFA’s seasonally adjusted monthly index for December was up 0.1 percent from November.

02/28/2024

CFPB/FTC amicus brief against illegal mortgage collection fees

The CFPB has posted a blog article, "Unlawful fees in the mortgage market," announcing that the Bureau has joined the Federal Trade Commission in filing an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (Atlanta, Georgia) in the case of Glover and Booze v. Ocwen Loan Servicing, LLC.

The case involves Ocwen's practice of charging a fee for making a payment online or by telephone, where the fee had not been agreed to in the agreement creating the debt, and a law had not affirmatively authorized the fee. Glover and Booze sued Ocwen after learning that such fees are illegal, and won their cases in a lower court. Ocwen has appealed the lower court's verdict to the Court of Appeals.

The FTC and the CFPB filed the amicus brief to urge the Court of Appeals to find in favor of Glover and Booze.

02/27/2024

FDIC guidance to financial institutions in areas of Washington

The FDIC has issued Financial Institution Letter FIL-8-2024 with guidance to help financial institutions and facilitate recovery in areas of Washington affected by wildfires that caused significant property damage August 18–25, 2023.

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