Tag Archives: Ellie Mae

After years of too-loose and then too-tight credit access, average FICO scores are now slowly floating down, and the market looks a little more open for low-score borrowers. But do these steady declines really indicate a loosening in standards among lenders? “Afraid not,” say researchers at the Urban Institute’s (UI) Housing Finance Policy Center.

Ellie Mae's latest Origination Insight Report, released this week, shows that out of a sampling of loan applications initiated 90 days prior to March, 58 percent closed last month. That rate is up from 55.3 percent in February and from the 2013 average of 54 percent.

In a fortuitous reversal for Ellie Mae, the company announced that a previously reported outage stemming from a presumed cyber-attack was in fact "triggered by a confluence of factors involving network, hardware, software and demand for service."

A release issued Thursday by the Federal Deposit Insurance (FDIC) urged financial institutions to "actively utilize available resources to identify and help mitigate potential cyber-related risks." The timing of the release is particularly germane, considering the recently discovered Heartbleed bug which affects almost two-thirds of the web, as well as recent cyber-attacks on industry giant Ellie Mae.

The recent technological attack on Ellie Mae could have been carried out by individuals with mortgage industry experience, the vendor says. The attacks occurred over a two-day span from March 31 to April 1, overwhelming the company’s servers with data requests that appeared to be legitimate communications.

Ellie Mae released its Origination Insight Report, which noted falling mortgage rates, shrinking refinances, and loosening of credit restrictions in the month of February. Ellie Mae's report, culled from 57 percent of Ellie Mae's mortgage application data, found that the average rate for a 30-year mortgage fell to 4.65 percent.

The veterans of this business can remember when REOs ran in the neighborhood of 150,000 a year, delinquency rates were just around 4 percent, and you only needed a credit score of 620 to qualify for a prime mortgage loan. But the housing finance industry, and default servicing especially, has changed. In the cover story of it's September issue, DS News looks at the many factors--from a slew of new regulatory mandates to an altered public perception of debt obligations--that have altered the business into something far from customary.

The mortgage lending division of Carrington Mortgage Services, LLC (Carrington) was inducted into the Ellie Mae Hall of Fame for mortgage technology.

After a three-year battle, Ellie Mae and software developer DocMagic reached a settlement over an antitrust suit, the companies announced jointly. DocMagic first filed against Ellie Mae in August 2009, alleging antitrust violations, intentional interference with contractual relationships, interference with prospective economic advantage, and unfair competition, according to a company release sent out at the time.

A study released Thursday by Ellie Mae found that community bankers see increasing regulations as the biggest immediate challenge to their mortgage businesses. More than half of community bank executives (51 percent) said that handling changing compliance standards is the most significant challenge for their banks. They specifically spoke of regulations created by the Dodd-Frank Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).