Last week, the CFPB issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) seeking information on the costs and benefits of reporting certain data points under HMDA and a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), wherein the proposal would raise the coverage thresholds for collecting and reporting data about closed-end mortgage loans and open-end lines of credit under HMDA. Specifically, the CFPB proposes two alternatives that would permanently increase the HMDA reporting threshold for closed-end mortgage loans to either 50 or 100 loans (up from the current 25 loans), in either of the two preceding calendar years. For open-end lines of credit, the proposal would extend for another two years the temporary reporting threshold of 500 open-end lines of credit. Once that temporary extension expires, the proposal would set the open-end reporting threshold permanently at 200 open-end lines of credit. The proposed changes may result in some smaller lenders and credit unions not having to report their lending activities, at all.
The CFPB also indicated that it would be retiring its HMDA Explorer tool. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) will publish a query tool for the 2018 data in the coming months, which will be available at ffiec.cfpb.gov. After the new query tool becomes available, the Bureau will retire the current HMDA Explorer tool and the Public Data Platform API that powers it, as these tools are not compatible with the HMDA data collected in or after 2018.