On February 1, the CFPB announced the launch of the 2018 HMDA LAR Formatting Tool (the “Tool”). The Tool will help financial institutions create an electronic file to submit HMDA data collected in 2018 and reported in 2019.  The Tool is not needed if the financial institution uses vendor or loan origination software to format their HMDA data into a pipe delimited text file, so this Tool will be most useful to those with small volumes of covered loans and applications.

The CFPB also announced minor updates to its 2018 Filing Instructions Guide, such as providing explicit instructions not to include leading zeros in data fields, and allowing an additional AUS result code produced by the Guaranteed Underwriting System.