One of the great pleasures of my position is working side-by-side with tireless advocates who simply want to leave our lending industry better than it was when they found it. One of those highly impactful people is David Stevens, who retired from his position as president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) earlier this year.
I’ve gotten to know Dave well during my previous four years as an MBA board member and as we faced down a number of industry challenges. I can attest to his dedication, strategic mind, leadership, energy, and social conscience.
Dave also has the unique ability to engage and find common ground no matter your political persuasion, which most certainly came in handy during these polarizing times. Achieving increased sustainable homeownership was his goal for both consumers and lenders.
He’s also fun to be around – which, to me, is the most important characteristic one can have. No matter how pressurized the situation, Dave is always quick to disarm a room with a joke or self-deprecating anecdote.
I’d like to personally thank Dave for his service and dedication to the mortgage banking industry. Whether you were a banker, a vendor, a borrower, a policy-maker or a consumer aspiring to be a homeowner, Dave had your back. He is, indeed, leaving the industry better than he found it.
Congratulations on your retirement, Dave, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors. Hopefully, we’ll see you out on the slopes soon!
By the same token, congratulations to Bob Broeksmit. He’s taking over the reins from Dave and has just finished his first MBA Annual Convention as president and CEO of the MBA. We’ll let him recover a little before we hit him up for a “Five Questions with…” column. In an asset class this large, there is still much to do to expand responsible homeownership.
This month’s newsletter is a critical one to read. Hot off the presses is Oliver Wyman’s study on VantageScore’s market adoption.
One of the questions we get most often is who uses VantageScore credit scores and how. The Oliver Wyman study demonstrates that usage of VantageScore credit scores by lenders and other market participants is deep, mainstream and prevalent across all consumer lending categories except the mortgage sector. I don’t have to remind readers that FICO enjoys what many consider to be a government-sanctioned monopoly in the mortgage sector…poised to end, I might add, with the enactment into law this past May of S. 2155 (section 310), which, among other things, requires the FHFA to establish “standards and criteria” to be used by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to validate and approve competitive scoring models for implementation — something we applaud because we know that healthy and fair competition always benefits both consumers and lenders.
Among the important takeaways from the report is that, in addition to VantageScore’s proud track record as the score consumers use to measure their own creditworthiness, usage of our scores by financial institutions continues to grow. Indeed, nearly 10.5 billion credit scores were used by over 2,800 users in the time period between July 1, 2017, and June 30, 2018, which represents a 20 percent and 3 percent increase respectively over last year’s adoption results.
Over 60 percent of credit scores were used by financial institutions, and credit card issuers were by far the largest users, representing nearly 4.4 billion of the total scores used.
The surge in usage continues a broader trend. Just in the past five years, VantageScore’s usage increased by more than 300 percent!
This groundswell usage of our credit scores and how we continue to reshape credit scoring is a testament to the power of competition.
In fact, at last week’s MBA Annual Convention, newly appointed MBA Board Chairman Chris George, CEO of CMG Financial, firmly endorsed competition, saying at his installation ceremony, “When has lack of choice ever been good for the consumer?” Indeed, our rising adoption numbers are proof that consumers, lenders and investors benefit when competition is infused into the marketplace. Congratulations on your new appointment, Chris, and thank you for your strong statement on the value of competition. We agree.
Finally, one last “congratulations” is in order. Our Communications group, led by Jeff Richardson, who, in conjunction with our public relations firm, APCO, was named the winner of an industry award in the category of “Best insights” by PR News, a top marketing-communications media outlet. Many other well-known brands of national standing were finalists. Congratulations to Jeff, his team and the APCO team.
Regards,
Barrett Burns
President and CEO