… payments and deposits program manager with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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President Joe Biden on Monday announced his intent to nominate Alvaro Bedoya to serve on the Federal Trade Commission.
If he is confirmed, Bedoya would replace Rohit Chopra, who is awaiting Senate confirmation as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, CNBC reports.
The FTC has five members, including Chair Lina Khan and commissioners Noah Phillips, Rebecca Slaughter and Christine Wilson. No more than three can be from the same political party.
Alvaro Bedoya is the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, where he is a visiting professor of law. 
Chopra has served on the FTC since 2018.
If confirmed as CFPB director, he will succeed Acting Director David Uejio, who has served since Director Kathy Kraninger resigned in January when Biden took office. Chopra will need to resign from his position on FTC to officially start as CFPB director.
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Brian Epling assists financial services clients, including small-dollar lenders, auto finance companies, and mortgage servicers, with navigating regulatory compliance and litigation issues.On the regulatory compliance side, Brian has assisted financial services clients with policies and procedures to comply with state and federal law and investor requirements.

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Article content
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden will nominate Alvaro Bedoya, a privacy advocate and Georgetown University law professor, to serve on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the White House said on Monday.
“It is the honor of my life to be nominated to serve on the FTC. When my family landed at JFK in 1987 with 4 suitcases and a grad student stipend, this was not what we expected,” tweeted Bedoya on Monday afternoon. “Vamos,” he added, which is Spanish for “let’s go.”

Bedoya, the founding director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, is also a former chief counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law. The FTC post requires Senate confirmation.

Article content
In its statement, the White House praised Bedoya for work exposing the harms of facial recognition technology, leading to restrictions on its use and audits to ferret out biases in the systems.
Bedoya in a lecture at the University of New Mexico in 2019 called privacy “a civil right.”
“At its heart, privacy is about human dignity: Whether the government feels it can invade your dignity, and whether the government feels it has to protect the most sensitive, most intimate facts of your life,” Bedoya said.
Bedoya has been skeptical of widespread, untargeted use of facial recognition technology, calling it in a 2017 newspaper opinion piece something that creates “profound questions about the future of our society.” In the piece, Bedoya also notes that the software often makes mistakes, particularly when searching for the faces of African Americans, women and young people.
Bedoya, if confirmed, would step into a post currently held by Rohit Chopra, who has been nominated by Biden to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)- a political lightning rod since it was created following the 2009 financial crisis.
Bedoya was born in Peru but is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
The five-member FTC currently has three Democrats, including Chairwoman Lina Khan, and two Republicans. If Chopra were to be confirmed to the CFPB and step down, the FTC would have two members from each party.
The agency enforces antitrust law and pursues allegations of deceptive advertising.
FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips, a Republican, said on Twitter that Bedoya “would bring a bright and thoughtful voice and a depth of experience working across the aisle on privacy to the FTC.

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After a slight lull, forbearance numbers across the board have started to lurch downwards, with the total number of loans dropping by 15 basis points to 3.08% as of Sept. 5, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association‘s latest survey.
The portfolio loans and private-label securities (PLS) category, which has remained stubbornly high, saw the most notable decline last week, dipping by 25 bps to 7.27%, the report said.
Meanwhile, in the race for who can get to the bottom first, Ginnie Mae loans fell by 24 bps to 3.39%, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans declined by 11 bps to 1.52%.
Mike Fratantoni, senior vice president and chief economist at the MBA, said in a statement that last week saw forbearance exits rev up to their fastest pace since March.
“The fast pace of exits outweighed the slight increase in new forbearance requests and re-entries,” said Fratantoni.

How can servicers best help borrowers as they exit forbearance?
Servicers should be communicating with borrowers early, ensuring to do so in a compliant manner by staying abreast of the current and proposed regulations, CFPB or otherwise. Alert them that they do have the option to sell their house now while in forbearance if they wish as a forbearance exit option.
Presented by: Altisource

New forbearance requests increased from 0.04% to 0.05%, and reentries represented 8.2% of total loans, unchanged from the week prior, the MBA said.
Fratantoni also noted that further declines are expected in the near- term.
“Servicer call volume jumped last week as summer came to an end and many borrowers reached the end of their forbearance terms,” he said. “We anticipate a similarly fast pace of exits in the weeks ahead.”
MBA’s data revealed that servicer call volume increased to 7.7%, up from 5.8% the week prior and that the average call length was also slightly prolonged from 8.1 minutes to 8.2 minutes.
The trade group estimates that 1.5 million borrowers remain in forbearance.
Mortgage servicers need to worry about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) which recently published a report that found a market increase in the share of borrowers exiting forbearance and becoming delinquent without a loss mitigation plan in place.
The report, which drew on data from 16 mortgage servicers from December 2020 to April 2021, also showed that some servicers are keeping up with the high call volume, while others are struggling to do so, causing higher wait times for some borrowers.
In a statement, the CFPB’s acting director, Dave Uejio, reiterated the agency’s chilly stance toward servicers.
“Many emergency mortgage protections are winding down, and servicers have had ample time to prepare for the millions of distressed homeowners who need their assistance,” said Uejio.

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President Joe Biden is set to nominate Alvaro Bedoya, a privacy advocate and professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, for a seat on the Federal Trade Commission, Politico reports.
Two unnamed sources familiar with the White House’s planning confirmed the decision to Politico, though it has yet to be officially confirmed. If nominated and confirmed by the Senate, Bedoya, a specialist in privacy law and the founder of Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology, would replace outgoing Democrat Commissioner Rohit Chopra, who has been selected to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 
Bedoya previously worked as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, where he worked to coordinate oversight hearings regarding the tracking of mobile location data and biometric information.
FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips, who was nominated by former President Donald Trump, told The Washington Post that he didn’t always agree with Bedoya but described him as “without fail as bright and thoughtful a person as you could find.”
Phillips added, “I don’t think of him as a person who just gets up and rants about entities he doesn’t like,” noting that Bedoya “thinks about the impacts of practices that concern him, engages with people who have views about those practices, and helps maps out a way forward.”
Jeffrey Zubricki, a veteran Senate staffer who previously worked with Bedoya and is now overseeing government relations with the marketplace website Etsy, said that Bedoya has “never seen privacy as a left or right issue, but as a core civil protection and civil rights concern in a way that can pull together both sides. There’s a whole generation of staffers he’s influenced that are still up there today.

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Foreclosures in Detroit and across Michigan have increased at a higher rate than in much of the rest of the country, according to new data from RealtyTrac. But the numbers remain low, the company’s executive vice president said, and are not a cause for concern.
Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s executive vice president, said the increase is a sign that Michigan’s judicial foreclosure system is playing catch-up after a number of months where there were very few filings.
In August, there were 78 foreclosures in Detroit, making the city third behind only Chicago and New York in areas with a metropolitan population of more than a million people. The number of foreclosures in Michigan increased by 62 percent in August from July, only behind New York when it comes to states that had at least 100 foreclosures, according to RealtyTrac.
“The numbers themselves aren’t really scary, no matter how you look at it,” Sharga said. “It’s very, very likely we will continue to see foreclosure activity increase between now and the end of the year.”
Wayne County’s 97 August foreclosures represent a 234 percent increase over August 2020, while Macomb’s 90 are a 275 percent increase. In Oakland County, the 57 August foreclosures are 280 percent higher than August 2020.
Last August, Sharga said, there were 108 total foreclosures processed in Michigan. This year, the number has nearly quadrupled, to 425. But in 2019, there were 1,345 foreclosures in August.
“It’s nothing to be alarmed at,” he said of the higher numbers.
Rick Linnell, a real estate attorney in Keego Harbor, said the activity he’s seeing is “not even remotely close” to what he and others experienced in 2008. He echoed Sharga — while the percentages are significant, he said, the numbers themselves remain low.
“I don’t think it’s going to have any particularly chilling effect on the residential marketplace,” Linnell said. “It’s concerning in general for people, but there’s so much optimism in real estate.”
While foreclosures are tragic on an individual basis, Linnell said, an increase is beneficial to the rental market — and to the investors who often buy foreclosed homes.
“The sharks, the lions, they’re lining up, hoping there will be sales,” he said. “A lot of investors are fighting for not so many deals.”
Numbers are still low, Sharga said, because of foreclosure protections through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are just beginning to end. The rules required mortgage servicers to work with homeowners to try to modify loans or otherwise prevent avoidable foreclosures.
Most of the newest crop, he said, are those where borrowers are unresponsive, property has already been abandoned or all modification options were exhausted.
Different states, he said, are catching up at different speeds. But nonresponsive borrowers can perhaps stave off foreclosure by communicating with lenders about their situation.
“It’s apparent the foreclosure mechanisms are restarting,” Sharga said. “The clock has started ticking again.

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Millions of lessors with little or no credit records have long been locked out of the American dream of owning a home. For some, it’s about to change for the better.
Starting September 18, mortgage giant Fannie Mae will review the latest 12-month rent payment history when lenders run an automated credit check system. Ambitious homeowners must grant Fanny permission to look up rent payment records from checking accounts or electronic services such as PayPal and Venmo.
Under the current system, landlords do not report rent payments to the three major credit rating agencies and are not included in traditional consumer credit score calculations. However, mortgage payments are included. Proponents have long fought to change that gap. It’s a great record of responsibly paying rent on time and can effectively lock out first-time buyers.

“For many households, rent is the single largest monthly cost. There is absolutely no reason why timely payments of monthly housing costs should not be included. [mortgage] Underwriting calculation “. Sandra L. Thompson, Deputy Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fanny’s regulator, said in a statement last month.
Fannie Mae estimates that about 17% of applicants over the last three years are eligible for a mortgage, given their rent history. It may not seem like much, but it includes the hordes of Americans most hurt by discriminatory housing policies dating back more than a century.

Investors with deep pockets drive homes …
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“Powerful additional tools”
“This is a very powerful addition to helping people left behind in this part of the market,” Cecilia Isaac, chief lender at One United Bank, the largest black-owned bank in the United States, told CBS Money Watch.
Fannie Mae CEO Hugh Freighter said in a recent blog post that he intentionally aims to narrow the racial wealth gap. According to the census at the end of June, about 45% of black Americans owned a home in the second quarter, compared to 74% of white Americans. that is, The booming single-family home market..
Still, according to a recent Urban Institute study, a record of rent payments on time could be a good credit indicator of someone paying a mortgage on time. Junchu, a co-author of the Urban Institute’s research and a clinical assistant professor at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, said that those who pay their monthly mortgages within a one-year deadline have traditionally low credit scores. Including, it states that there is a possibility of default of about 2.8%. ..
“Currently using the new Fannie Mae system, [potential borrowers] I have a second chance. And it shows that the probability of default is actually very low. So this is really good to take into account rent payments. “
Another important feature: Consumers do not lose their chances of buying a home if they miss or delay payment. Fannie Mae will only use the information if it increases creditworthiness and the likelihood of personal approval, as announced in August. Future homeowners can reapply if their credit score improves and they don’t have to worry about the bad things tied to previous rent checks.
“If you go through this process and the results of your rental history look are not positive, you won’t lose your ability to qualify on a regular basis. They won’t use it for you, and that’s what consumers know. Is important, “said Isaac of One United.
Close the wealth gap
In total, about 45 million Americans have little or limited credit history. It makes it difficult to apply for a mortgage, I found a 2015 report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Black and Hispanic applicants are likely to have little or no history, contributing to the country’s large wealth gap.
“Home ownership builds wealth in the sense that it has assets that are valued over time. It is used as a basis for retaining, transferring to relatives, and moving up. “Issac said,” Equity building in the house makes it possible to close a significant amount of wealth gaps. “
For Jenn Gummel, a real estate agent in Dover, Delaware, the change in rental income will not be immediate. Most first-time buyers she meets ask if she can include rental history, but are surprised to find that she can’t, she told CBS MoneyWatch.
“Almost all first-time buyers told me,’I really want the underwriting to take into account my rent payment history.’ Well, that’s what they actually say. No, but that’s what they’re trying to say. “
Gummel recalls a recent client in New York City who was denied a mortgage application.

Black realtor handcuffed at home v ..
01:29
“They were paying an insane amount of rent and their rent in New York. [in Delaware] I fell a lot. If they could use their rent payment history, they would probably have been able to get a mortgage, “Gammel said.
Fanny itself does not lend directly to the borrower. Rather, buy a mortgage from a lender, including a bank. Fannie Mae and her cousin Freddie Mac, known as the Government-Sponsored Agency, were part of a program created to help promote home ownership and build wealth in the decades following the Great Depression. Mortgages held by GSE are guaranteed by the federal government and also help protect lenders from financial collapse.
GSE owns more than 60% of all US mortgages. Therefore, if Fannie Mae says the loan is not a good risk, the bank will usually refuse the application because the resulting mortgage cannot be sold to Fannie.
Experian, TransUnion, Equifax
These mortgage valuations are tied to credit scores like those used by three major credit agencies: Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. Mortgage underwriters use FICO scores edited by Fair Isaac Corporation. According to experts, the lowest score for a traditional 30-year mortgage at a bank is usually 620. However, people with a score of less than 700 tend to be scrutinized.
Urban Institute Jun and Gammel said rent checks are optional, so consumers may want to postpone if the score exceeds about 700. Without it, it is likely to be approved.
“Obviously, if they have a credit score of 760 or 700, I don’t think they really need it [the check]Gammel told CBS Money Watch. “It’s really people who are right under or above the bar, just to give them a little boost.

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President Joe Biden will nominate Alvaro Bedoya, a Georgetown University law professor and privacy advocate, to serve on the Federal Trade Commission, according to news reports.
Bedoya is the founding director of Georgetown’s Center on Privacy and Technology and previously served as chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary privacy subcommittee, then chaired by former Democratic Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota. He is seen as an expert on privacy issues related to the technology industry.

Bedoya will replace current Commissioner Rohit Chopra, whom Biden nominated to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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President Joe Biden is set to nominate Alvaro Bedoya, a Georgetown University law professor and privacy advocate, to serve on the US Federal Trade Commission, three sources briefed on the matter said on Monday.
Alvaro Bedoya
Alvaro Bedoya, the founding director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, is also a former chief counsel of the US Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law. The FTC post requires Senate confirmation.
A White House announcement is expected later on Monday. Axios reported the planned nomination earlier.
Bedoya, if confirmed, would step into a post currently held by Rohit Chopra, who has been nominated by Biden to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a political lightning rod since it was created following the 2009 financial crisis.
The five-member FTC currently has three Democrats, including Chairwoman Lina Khan, and two Republicans. If Chopra were to be confirmed to the CFPB and step down, the FTC would have two members from each party.

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By Diane Bartz and David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Joe Biden is set to nominate Alvaro Bedoya, a Georgetown University law professor and privacy advocate, to serve on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, three sources briefed on the matter said on Monday.
Bedoya, the founding director of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, is also a former chief counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law. The FTC post requires Senate confirmation.
A White House announcement is expected later on Monday. Axios reported the planned nomination earlier.
Bedoya in a lecture at the University of New Mexico in 2019 called privacy “a civil right.”
“At its heart, privacy is about human dignity: Whether the government feels it can invade your dignity, and whether the government feels it has to protect the most sensitive, most intimate facts of your life,” Bedoya said.
Bedoya has been skeptical of widespread, untargeted use of facial recognition technology, calling it in a 2017 newspaper opinion piece something that creates “profound questions about the future of our society.” In the piece, Bedoya also notes that the software often makes mistakes, particularly when searching for the faces of African Americans, women and young people.
Bedoya, if confirmed, would step into a post currently held by Rohit Chopra, who has been nominated by Biden to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – a political lightning rod since it was created following the 2009 financial crisis.
The five-member FTC currently has three Democrats, including Chairwoman Lina Khan, and two Republicans. If Chopra were to be confirmed to the CFPB and step down, the FTC would have two members from each party.
The agency enforces antitrust law and pursues allegations of deceptive advertising.
FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips, a Republican, said on Twitter that Bedoya “would bring a bright and thoughtful voice and a depth of experience working across the aisle on privacy to the FTC.

[…] […]

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President Joe Biden plans to nominate Georgetown University law professor Alvaro Bedoya to be a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Bedoya, a privacy law expert who leads the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown’s law school, would replace FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, who has been nominated to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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