When it comes to compliance for banks, mortgage companies, credit unions, fintechs, Hilltop Advisors’ Compliance team understands the challenges of mitigating risks, testing compliance policies and procedures and reducing the cost of such compliance. More importantly, we understand the impact non-compliance and risk exposure can have on a company. Our compliance assessments include the following:
- Lender and servicer compliance – assessing the completeness and scope/content of policies and defines what the Company recognizes as its lender and/or loan servicer compliance requirements (for all applicable loan types),
- Loan Risk policy compliance – assessing the credit risk (credit memorandum and support) and the loan risk rating policies, procedures and what the personnel qualifications are for determining what the Bank’s credit risks and/or loan risk ratings are,
- Accounting compliance – assessing the borrower’s and guarantor’s financial positions at the origination date, assessing the credit loss characteristics over a 10 year history (for CECL accounting), use of the historical loss data for the Allowance for Loan and Lease Losses (ALLL),
- Regulatory compliance – assessing the regulations that apply, identifying the policies and testing the procedures used to ensure the Bank is compliant.
- Service contracts compliance in which the Bank is the provider or is the user of such service (mortgage sub-servicers, trustees, appraisers, etc.) – assessing the contract performance and whether the service provider is meeting all of the contract terms (deliverables, quality/completeness, timeliness, third party compliance),
- Purchase and Sale agreement compliance – assessing whether the buyer and seller responsibilities have been met in accordance with the agreement (performance requirements, earn-out calculations and other terms),
- Bank Secrecy Act compliance – assessing whether the appropriate policies and control procedures are in place to detect, prevent and report malicious cyber activity and scams, phishing, spear fishing, malware, ransomware/extortion, “fake” business email compromised (BEC) schemes (especially in the current pandemic) where more transacitons are being completed online,
- Fraud and Whistleblower compliance – assessing preventive and detective controls (including encouraging Whistleblower activity) are effective in reducing the vulnerability to fraud (borrowers, vendors, employees, subservicers, outsourcing companies, etc.) and/or encouraging whistleblowers to communicate concerns to the Company as part of its compliance efforts,
- Operational procedures compliance – assessing the procedures that are not consistent with the Bank’s policies to identify inefficiencies and/or high costs.
Our Compliance team would like to discuss your company’s compliance environment and its challenges that we may be able to help with.
