The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will provide lenders and servicers with plain-language guides, rule interpretations and other materials to help them comply with new mortgage lending and servicing rules.
The CFPB’s ability-to-pay rule and national servicing standards go live in January 2014. Until then, the agency is launching several initiatives to make sure lenders and servicers know how to comply with the rules and understand what to expect once the rules officially go live.
“Our plan is to work with the mortgage industry to ensure that the CFPB’s new rules are implemented accurately and expeditiously,” said CFPB director Richard Cordray. “Both consumers and industry will win when the new rules are understood, applied, and carried out evenly and effectively. Mortgage borrowers, who have dealt with much heartache since the financial crisis, deserve this level of attentiveness.”
The CFPB also attempted to quash fears that the agency is making rules without establishing how they conflict or overlap with regulations from other agencies.
The bureau said it’s keying up the new QM and servicing rules by consulting with other agencies to ensure prudential regulators understand the CFPB’s guidelines and remain committed to consistent and streamlined enforcement.
The CFPB will give lenders, servicers and other impacted financial firms plain-language guides with easy-to-understand summaries in written and video form this spring.
In addition, the CFPB will publish updates to the rules’ official interpretations, publish readiness guides with steps to follow to remain in compliance and will educate consumers about some of the new protections that they are about to obtain under these rules through a broad-based consumer education campaign.
More information on the new regulations is available at the CFPB’s website.
