#mortgage-origination

#mortgage-origination

Puerto Rico-based Popular Bank is exiting the mortgage business, according to an announcement made last week during the company's third-quarter earnings call. Specifically, as part of our ongoing efforts to improve profitability, we decided to exit the U.S. residential mortgage origination business and to close four underperforming branches in the New York metro area, said Jorge Garcia, Popular's chief financial officer. We will remain focused on areas where we feel we can invest to achieve improved operating leverage.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Melville, New York, Reliance is a fully integrated direct-to-consumer mortgage origination platform that has 315 employees, including more than 150 loan officers and sales managers, across six call centers. Reliance originates approximately $1 billion in mortgages each year across government, agency, non-agency/non-QM and second-lien loan products. The company's servicing portfolio of more than 16,000 customers and $3 billion in unpaid principal balance will move onto Carrington's platform once the transaction closes.

Cornerstone said the deal will expand its statewide market share, moving it into the top 20 Texas banks with less than $10 billion in assets, while reducing its cost of deposits by about 68 basis points. The merger is also expected to boost the bank's mortgage origination and servicing divisions by creating additional lending capacity and generating significant pricing and revenue synergies without compromising asset quality, according to the announcement.

What we recognized was, buying a home is a really complex process, and there are a lot of documents and requirements, and just one of those was verification of insurance. As it exists today, that process is complicated, so we saw an opportunity to say, how can we take that piece of it and just simplify it? Tuttle shared that HOIVerify can take a process that once took several days and perform it in seven seconds.