Will mortgage companies do the right thing?

With less pressure from regulatory agencies, will mortgage companies continue to do the right thing for consumers?

I spent the majority of my mortgage career in the customer experience space. Managing call centers, responding to complaint letters, and meeting with consumer advocates - that's how I spent my time, and I saw myself as an advocate for consumers to get the information they needed and be treated fairly. With recent layoffs and dismissed lawsuits over at the

CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau), I'm a bit worried that this reduced focus will come back to harm consumers. Let me share some examples to demonstrate why I'm worried.

Fees: the CFPB came down hard on mortgage companies about the fees charged for phone payments, payoff statements, faxes, and more. When I worked for one company in the 90s, they jacked up fax fees during a re-fi boon and almost brought the call center to its knees. I can remember getting the edict: fax fees are increased to $50 effective immediately. I had always been trained that any fee had to have a relationship to the actual work it takes to perform that particular process and $50 was WAY beyond a reasonable amount for a service that required no human intervention. That increase only lasted a few days because of the complaints we received and the fear of being reported to the regulators. Later, it was the norm to waive pay by phone, fax fees, payoff statement fees, and other small fees that kept dinging customers during the mortgage process. This is a direct result of the CFPB's focus on fees and ensuring that mortgage companies kept it fair when adding these extra monies to a customer's obligations.

Response Times to Customer Concerns: before the CFPB, it was a bit like the Wild West when it came to tracking customer concerns and how quickly companies responded. When I first started my career as a Customer Service Researcher, I can remember that I kept a bucket of customer mail under my desk with each day's receipts bundled together with a rubber band and a date stamp. We aged the mail but there was no "deadline" to get the response out the door, and when the call center was busy all the researchers were put on the telephones so formal complaints were definitely on the back burner of priorities. The whole way complaints are aged and reported on has changed thanks to increased scrutiny and everyone knows that if you want to see where problems are in an operation, you start with the complaints. Mortgage companies still get a 30 business day response window for complaints which is out of touch with our world where customers expect an immediate resolution. This is an area of concern if no one is tracking and reporting on this issue. Response times on complaints may escalate far beyond the 30 business day window if no one is watching.

Making customers whole: Mortgage companies make mistakes. Before the CFPB, when a mistake was found on a loan, the mortgage company fixed that mistake and moved on. But with the CFPB in place, companies had to show not only that they fixed the problem on one loan, but that they ran reporting to see if other customers might have had the same issue, and companies were required to show how they made those other customers whole too. This "root cause analysis" became a new team within the complaint area as well as within the compliance team ---- what did we learn from this mistake and are there other customers who didn't complain but still deserve the fix and perhaps restitution???? I'm worried that companies will go back to this short-sighted mindset - just fix it and move on instead of taking a minute to look at the big picture.

Mortgage leaders: - now is the time to show your core values and continue to do right by the customers even if you will not be punished by a third party if you drop the ball. It will be easier to look the other way and it may be cheaper in the short term too --- but the integrity of the industry is at stake. I hope that the front-line staff aren't saying "I can't believe we're going to do this" like I did with that fax fee. Make sure that your employees are proud of the decisions you are making for both them and your customers.