11/1/2018 ICE makes its move in $15tn US mortgage market | Financial Times

FT Trading Room Intercontinental Exchange ICE makes its move in $15tn US mortgage market

Exchange group bets on modernisation as it takes full control of home loan registry MERS

Jeffrey Sprecher: 'Handling boxes and boxes of mortgages is a massive undertaking'

Gregory Meyer in New York SEPTEMBER 30, 2018

The company that owns the is putting itself at the centre of the $15tn US mortgage market in anticipation of an epochal switch to electronic documents from unwieldy stacks of paper.

Intercontinental Exchange, which is known for transforming musty financial institutions into lucrative high-tech trading venues, is close to taking full control of Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, which keeps track of almost 30m US home loans.

It is doing so at a time when 99 per cent of mortgage documents are still on paper, but amid an industry push for digitisation that ICE’s founder Jeffrey Sprecher hopes will turn the utility-like MERS into a new profit engine for his company.

Mr Sprecher first bought a controlling stake in 2016, and has only hinted at his ambition for the business since then. He has likened MERS to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp, the securities clearing house owned by banks that long dealt in paper share certificates.

Brendon Weiss, chief operating officer at MERS, told the Financial Times that ICE intends a “full acquisition” of the registry. The deal for the remaining stake it does not already own is expected https://www.ft.com/content/b55df5ca-b6d6-11e8-b3ef-799c8613f4a1 1/6 11/1/2018 ICE makes its move in $15tn US mortgage market | Financial Times within the next few weeks.

“ICE’s experience in the past has been taking analogue markets and making them digital,” he said. Among those were the London’s former International Petroleum Exchange and the New York Board of Trade, whose noisy trading pits shut after ICE acquired them (see below).

MERS was created in 1995 to track changes in loan ownership and servicing rights, making it easier for loans to change hands among its 5,000 members.

For ICE, full ownership of MERS presents an opportunity to transform the member-owned utility by reducing costs and improving efficiencies. “It’s a very big total addressable market. It’s probably the second largest in the world,” said Christopher McEntee, ICE’s director of corporate development, who joined the company from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta.

The arrival of ICE into the mortgage industry has sparked intrigue as to its plans. Founded in 2000 as an energy trading platform, it is now the world’s second-most valuable exchange group.

https://www.ft.com/content/b55df5ca-b6d6-11e8-b3ef-799c8613f4a1 2/6 11/1/2018 ICE makes its move in $15tn US mortgage market | Financial Times Federal records show the company’s representatives have lobbied Congress on “Housing Market Structure Modernisation,” efforts ICE executives would not shed more light on.

In mid-September, ICE migrated MERS’s almost 30m records to the same high-security data centre in Mahwah, New Jersey where NYSE matches deals between microsecond-speed stock traders, a company spokesman said.

“If I had to guess, what is probably their long-term play is to create the New York Stock Exchange for mortgages,” said Tim Anderson, director of eStrategy at DocMagic, a software vendor connected to the MERS system.

Mr McEntee, who sits on the MERS board, declined to discuss the purchase price for the remaining MERS stake. ICE has not disclosed what percentage of the business it currently owns.

He said ICE does not currently plan to turn MERS into a mortgage exchange, even if the technology resides in the same building as NYSE’s computers. Individual home loans are too heterogeneous to lend themselves to the kind of rapid-fire continuous auctions that comprise exchange trading, he said. https://www.ft.com/content/b55df5ca-b6d6-11e8-b3ef-799c8613f4a1 3/6 11/1/2018 ICE makes its move in $15tn US mortgage market | Financial Times What ICE intends to do is make it faster and easier to track who has issued home loans and who purchased them. Improved technology could hasten the adoption of digital mortgages and facilitate the process of securitisation, in which home loans are bundled for sale to big investors.

Just 347,000 digital mortgage notes, known as eNotes, have been registered at MERS so far, although they have been permitted by law since the year 2000. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage agencies, first accepted them for purchase more than a decade ago.

For several reasons — not least the subprime mortgage crisis — the industry has been slow to adopt them. “It’s been fits and starts for 18 years,” said Margo Tank, a lawyer at DLA Piper.

They may be finally gaining momentum. Ginnie Mae, which guarantees government-insured and guaranteed loans, recently said it would lay groundwork for processing digital mortgages by 2019.

Lenders such as Quicken Loans have begun to originate digital mortgages. A handful of warehouse lenders such as Bank of America have begun to fund them. The US Treasury department has endorsed their wider use.

“It’s a potential tipping point,” said Michael Fratantoni, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, who also chairs MERS’ membership committee. “Finally we’re at a place where we’re not seeing the roadblocks that have kept the industry from moving to a fully digital process.”

The low-profile MERS burst into the headlines during the housing crisis. It was sued by borrowers The promise here is that if fighting foreclosure and by local governments you can get more machine claiming it robbed them of recording fees, but it scalability you can get prevailed in court. margins In 2011, however, US banking regulators ordered Christopher McEntee, ICE director of corporate MERS to improve its practices after finding development management failures in tracking mortgage loans and initiating foreclosures. They lifted the order in January this year, citing full compliance.

With legal problems resolved, ICE executives now see MERS as poised for growth and mortgages as a huge untapped opportunity. The business registers 5.5m loans a year, 75 per cent of all new mortgages.

MERS charges users modest fees, typically $11.95 per loan registration. ICE shareholders accustomed to the company’s rank as one of the nation’s most profitable companies may want to see higher fees. https://www.ft.com/content/b55df5ca-b6d6-11e8-b3ef-799c8613f4a1 4/6 11/1/2018 ICE makes its move in $15tn US mortgage market | Financial Times But Mr McEntee said he envisaged higher profit margins for MERS through better technology and stronger volumes rather than fee raises. “The promise here is that if you can get more machine scalability you can get margins,” he said.

Mr Sprecher has said MERS is ripe for change. “Handling boxes and boxes of mortgages is a massive undertaking for many of these companies and there’s a lot of incumbents, and there’s a lot of things that have to get disintermediated in order to go from analogue to digital, but the trend is there,” he told a conference in June.

“It’s one of the largest asset classes that we see that’s still analogue, and we want to be right at the middle of it.” ICE: no physical attachment

Most financial exchanges were built in centuries past, when brokers and traders agreed deals with shouts and hand gestures. Intercontinental Exchange was formed in May 2000 as the dotcom bubble was losing air. Entrepreneur Jeffrey Sprecher set up the company as an all-electronic marketplace for gas and power. ICE received an inadvertent assist from the energy trader , whose rival online platform imploded when the company did. “After the collapse of Enron, our revenues took off,” Mr Sprecher has said. A lack of attachment to physical trading venues marked its growth. In 2001 it acquired International Petroleum Exchange, the largest energy futures exchange in Europe. After shutting down the IPE’s floor in 2005, volumes in flagship crude oil contract Brent have grown eightfold. ICE also shut down the trading floor after purchasing the New York Board of Trade, an exchange for cotton, sugar and other soft commodities, in 2007. The Winnipeg Commodity Exchange, a Canadian canola seed venue, was acquired by ICE and incorporated into its US-based electronic futures platform. In 2013 ICE made its largest-ever acquisition with the purchase of the NYSE . The prize justifying its $10bn price tag was the all-electronic Liffe futures exchange in London, but the deal also gave ICE ownership of the New York Stock Exchange — whose ornate floor has been kept open.

Additional reporting by Joe Rennison in New York

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