Servicing

Mortgage Master, based in Walpole, Massachusetts, selected Karen Menza to lead the company's Midwest operation team as regional operations manager.

Trulia announced the beta launch of Trulia Suggests, a new, personalized, and visually engaging way for home buyers to discover homes.

GMH Mortgage Services LLC, a nationally recognized mortgage banker headquartered in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, announced a new hire. Frank DiMaio joined the company as SVP of national retail sales.

A major investor in residential mortgage-backed security trusts filed a complaint against Nationstar over its selling of non-performing loans backing securities.

FDIC announced Friday the closure of Frontier Bank, based in LaGrange, Georgia. Frontier Bank mark's Georgia's first bank failure in 2013 and is the nation's fourth failure overall this year. By the same time in 2012, there had been 12 bank collapses.

According to the Flow of Funds report for Q4 2012, household assets grew to $79.5 trillion in the fourth quarter, an increase of $1.3 trillion--not too shabby. Household financial assets were up $784 billion to $54.4 billion but home equity (the value of household real estate less loans against that real estate) grew $452.8 billion, the result of two moving parts: real estate values (which increased) and household mortgage liabilities, which dropped. Once the dust settled, it meant equity in household real estate assets moved to 46.6 percent in the Q4.

Lender Processing Services, Inc., (LPS) announced the launch of new mortgage insurance (MI) products through the LPS Loan Quality Gateway.

Vericrest Financial, Inc., a Dallas-based financial services company specializing in residential mortgage loan servicing, announced the appointment of Joe Anderson to chairman and CEO, effective immediately. Anderson will lead the integration of Vericrest and Caliber Funding, LLC and assume the role of chairman and CEO of the combined organization.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder caused a stir Wednesday by voicing the idea that certain financial institutions may be "too big to jail." In a testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Justice Department (DoJ) oversight, Holder said he is "concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to to prosecute when we are hit with indications ... it will have a negative impact on the national economy."

The economy added 236,000 jobs in February and the unemployment rate slipped to 7.7 percent, its lowest level since December 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Friday. Economists had forecast payrolls would grow by 160,000 and that the unemployment rate would remain at 7.8 percent.