Monthly Archives: April 2015

FinCen’s New Geographic Target Order Affects Miami-Based Businesses and Banks

On April 21, 2015, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a Geographic Targeting Order (GTO) in coordination with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) and Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office South Florida Money Laundering Strike Force. The GTO dircetly affects reporting obligations for many Miami-based businesses, including area financial institutions. The GTO’s [...]

April 22nd, 2015|

Is Scrutiny of Language-Based Discrimination on the Fair Lending Horizon?

The CFPB has made a concerted effort to make its programs and services accessible to financial consumers with limited proficiency in English. While this paradigm is noteworthy on its own, Paul Hastings, et al feel this could be a signal of things to come: While these recent agency activities are noteworthy developments in their own [...]

April 21st, 2015|

Mortgage Lender Fined for Deceptive Advertising

In the CFPB’s most recent Supervisory Highlights, released in mid March, one line item of note for Fair Lending violations was a rulling that a lender practiced deceptive and harmful advertising. In the highlighted case, the lender’s marketing materials contained written statements regarding the prohibition on non-employment sources of income, and discouraged applicants who received [...]

April 20th, 2015|

The CD Test Prevents a Bank from Getting a “Satisfactory” CRA Rating

Among the round of CRA ratings released for April 2015, the 2015 performance evaluation (PE) of Belmont Savings Bank (Belmont) highlights how a poor evaluation under the Community Development (CD) test can overshadow satisfactory lending to low- and moderate-income (LMI) geographies and borrowers: Overall, Belmont’s level of CD lending since the previous evaluation demonstrates poor [...]

April 20th, 2015|

Fair Lending Issues Complicate a Major Acquisition

The long-delayed acquisition of Hudson City Bancorp (Hudson City) by M&T Bank Corp. (M&T) has hit another roadblock due to compliance issues. While the deal has already been delayed since 2012 due to concerns over M&T’s AML controls, a CFPB examination of Hudson City’s Fair Lending compliance has introduced new complications into the pending transaction: [...]

April 20th, 2015|

Simplifying Rules to Help Community Banks

The community bank segment has struggled since the crisis to gain momentum in an evolving mortgage market. While drastic changes, such as bank failures and mergers, were not unexpected outcomes from the mortgage crisis, community banks were especially hard hit compared to their larger competitors during the recovery. Specifically, the myriad new regulations born out [...]

April 20th, 2015|

5 Ways Lenders Can Use the 2013 Public HMDA Database

On September 22, 2014, in accordance with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), the FFIEC released to the public the HMDA database for the 2013 reporting year. The public data can be leveraged as an asset that can support Fair Lending and CRA compliance as well as marketing efforts.  The following are five ways lenders [...]

April 9th, 2015|

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