Government

At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he plans to begin drafting legislation to overhaul regulation of the nation’s financial system by early May.

DocuTech Corp., a provider of compliance services and document technology for the mortgage industry, has opened a new office in Portland, Oregon. The company said its expansion is to meet growing customer and technology development needs in the mortgage marketplace.

On Wednesday, as Vice President Joe Biden hosts local officials from across the country at the White House to discuss how funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) will support new economic growth in their communities, the Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund is releasing its implementation plan to award nearly $100 million in grants and $3 billion in additional tax credit authority to support community-based financial institutions.

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee concluded its monthly meeting on Wednesday afternoon, and announced several aggressive initiatives to provide greater support to mortgage lending and housing markets, the committee said in a statement to the press.

Representatives from the U.S. Treasury, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac took part in a conference call on Tuesday, hosted by the Mortgage Bankers Association and the HOPE NOW Alliance to answer a growing list of servicers’ questions (said to be six pages, single-spaced) regarding the administration’s Home Affordable Modification program.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) submitted its fourth quarter report to Congress this week detailing actions the GSEs have taken to prevent unnecessary foreclosures. The report shows a 76 percent increase in loan modifications by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the third to fourth quarters of 2008.

Scottsdale, Arizona-based Response Analytics Inc. has released a new software module developed for mortgage servicers, investors, and mortgage insurers that the company says dramatically simplifies the administration of loan modifications under the federal government’s Making Home Affordable plan unveiled earlier this month.

Two Texas companies, SigniaDocs, a provider of electronic mortgage services, and World Wide Notary, a provider of electronic notarization, announced on Monday that they have integrated their platforms to support eSignatures and eNotarizations for any mortgage document or document set.

In a rare television interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes:http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml this weekend, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the American public that the U.

Santa Ana, California’s RealEC Technologies Inc., a provider of collaborative mortgage network solutions that is majority-owned by Lender Processing Services, today announced that it has surpassed a milestone of more than 42 million real estate orders processed through its network, since the company was founded in 1998.