Nationwide Fair Lending Denial Disparity Drops

Online, December 9, 2010 (Newswire.com) - TruPoint Partners, a leading provider of bank lending compliance software and services, announces the completion of Phase One, of their statistical analysis of the FFIEC's aggregate Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Loan Application Registry (LAR) data.

The HMDA data is collected from all financial institutions located within Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA). TruPoint analyzed all loan applications, originations, purchases, refinancing and home- improvement loans from 2006 through the latest release of the 2009 HMDA loan data released earlier this year.

State level denial disparity indexes were calculated by aggregating all loan activity by all lenders within the state for both 2008 and 2009. The denial disparity among different borrower types is one of the factors reviewed as part of a Fair Lending Self Assessment review.

Early results from the analysis point to a narrowing of lending disparity between minority and non-minority borrowers in 2009. Of 51 states analyzed, 34 had lower denial disparity indexes in 2009 than in 2008. Six states remained the same and only eleven were marginally higher. Effectively 67% of the states reported better denial disparity rates in 2009 than was reported in 2008.

"Many industry watchers will see this as an indication that the nation's lenders are making positive strides in meeting the credit needs of everyone in their communities and we think that would be a correct interpretation of that data", stated Trey Sullivan, CEO of TruPoint Partners.

As part of a national review of all home mortgage loan activity, TruPoint has provided public access to the state denial disparity data through its website. This information can be found at http://www.trupointpartners.com/fair-lending-hmda-denial-map TruPoint is offering financial institutions a FREE 2009 Denial Disparity Report for a limited time.