MetLife Agrees to Sell Servicing Portfolio to JPMorgan

The country's largest life insurance provider announced it is selling its mortgage servicing portfolio to one of the country's biggest mortgage servicers.

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""MetLife, Inc."":https://www.metlife.com/about/index.html, announced an agreement to sell MetLife Bank, N.A.'s mortgage servicing portfolio to ""JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A."":http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/Home/home.htm The terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but MetLife revealed in a statement the portfolio is worth approximately $70 billion.

MetLife's entire retail banking business, including mortgages, represented less than 2 percent of its operating earnings in 2011.

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The company decided at that point to focus on its business as a global insurer and employee benefits provider.

""Since that time, MetLife has entered into agreements to sell MetLife bank's deposit business to GE capital, sold the bank's warehouse finance business to EverBank, sold the bank's reverse mortgage servicing rights to Nationstar, and ceased writing residential mortgages,"" said MetLife Bank president Jim Rose.

In a regulatory filing in October, MetLife announced it was exploring a sale of its mortgage servicing portfolio and began reporting MetLife Bank's forward mortgage servicing assets and operations as divested businesses.

As a result of the purchase, Chase's $1.1 trillion servicing business is expected to grow by more than 5 percent.

""The acquisition of this high-quality portfolio reflects our strategy to strengthen and grow our Servicing business,"" said Eric Schuppenhauer, head of mortgage servicing at Chase. ""We will be able to provide our full range of products and services to an additional 350,000 individuals and families. We expect that many of these customers will take advantage of historically low interest rates by refinancing.""