HMDA changes are coming. Is your credit union prepared?

Originally published in CU Insight. Written by Brandy Bruyere, NCCO, Vice President of Regulatory Compliance, NAFCU

Some credit unions that are required to comply with the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requirements are getting a compliance break. Under Dodd-Frank, HMDA requires credit unions to collect new specific data points and specifies how these new points must be reported to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (Bureau).  However, the recently passed Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (S.2155) will help reduce regulatory burdens.

While S.2155 does not change whether your credit union is subject to HMDA, it provided regulatory relief for some credit unions by significantly reducing the amount of data that needs to be collected, adding a new threshold for which financial institutions will be required to collect and report the data points.

Why have the data reporting requirements changed?

S.2155 amends a section of HMDA to add a partial exemption from certain data reporting requirements. As amended, a credit union that is a financial institution but did not originate 500 closed-end mortgage loans or 500 open-end lines of credit in the past 2 calendar years would not need to follow "the requirements of paragraphs (5) and (6)" of 12 U.S.C. 2803(b) (HMDA). It was not entirely clear how this would be implemented until August 31, 2018, when the bureau issued guidance identifying 26 data points as being eligible for this partial exemption. This includes: the universal loan identifier (ULI); property address; rate spread; credit score; reasons for denial; total points and fees; origination charges; lender credits; discount points; debt-to-income ratio; combined loan-to-value ratio; property value, and more. The partial exemption applies based on whether a credit union is below the threshold for the loan type. For example, if in each the prior two years, a credit union originates over 500 open-end HMDA covered loans, but under 500 closed-end HMDA loans, the partial exemption would only be available for the credit union's closed-end loans.

What about the legal entity identifier (LEI)?

NAFCU's compliance team received many questions leading up to the HMDA implementation deadline about the rule's requirement that the credit union have an LEI, but this is a component of the "universal loan identifier" data point. The bureau confirmed that the ULI is eligible for a partial exemption, so some credit unions will no longer need to maintain an LEI and create ULIs. However, the bureau's recent guidance clarified that credit unions operating under the partial exemption will still be required to provide a "non-universal loan identifier" for loans, which "does not need to be unique within the industry." Rather, this loan identifier can have up to 22 characters and must meet the following additional requirements:

  1. May be letters, numerals, or a combination of letters and numerals;
  2. Must be unique within the credit union (e.g. only one is assigned to any particular covered loan/application, and each corresponds to a single application); and
  3. Must not include any information that could be used to directly identify the applicant or borrower (e.g. name, date of birth, Social Security number, driver's license or identification number, etc.)

For more information, including a chart created by the bureau highlighting which specific data points are eligible for the partial exemption, check out this NAFCU Compliance Blog post.