Wolters Kluwer Financial Services enhanced its CRA and Fair Lending solutions to help financial institutions address their growing compliance obligations as a result of the 2010 U.S. Census.

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council recently announced that institutions will be required to use the new census tract information in 2012 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Community Reinvestment Act data collection.

Deciphering the vast amount of new census information will be critical for financial institutions in continuing to ensure fair and antidiscriminatory lending requirements are met, the company said. For example, nearly 40 Metropolitian Stastical Areas, or about one in ten of the 442 MSA/MDs nationwide, has had a 10% or greater increase in the number of tracts considered low or moderate income. Institutions lending in these areas must modify their lending practices in order to remain in compliance with CRA.

The updated solutions include the latest census tract income categorizations, boundary definitions, and demographic data.

In addition, Fair Lending Wiz now includes a Race Proxy functionality. The new functionality helps institutions to make a determination of an applicant’s race when this information is not available in the loan file. The feature further extends the fair lending solution’s current ability to provide gender and minority proxies. These proxies help improve the quality of HMDA loan data to detect potential problems that may contribute to discriminatory loans.

“We continue to strengthen our CRA and fair lending solutions to help our customers address new requirements as they occur and regulators’ intensified scrutiny of their lending practices,” says Heather Czermak, general manager of Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ Consumer Compliance and Financial Crime Control business lines.

 

 

[This article was posted on February 8, 2012, on the website of ABA Banking Journal, www.ababj.com.]

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