Fannie Mae Launches Loan-Level Disclosure Initiative

""Fannie Mae"":www.fanniemae.com/ announced an initiative to make loan-level data for single-family mortgage-backed securities (MBS) accessible as a move towards transparency.

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The government-sponsored enterprise will start releasing loan-level data beginning the first quarter of 2012 and will provide data updates regularly.

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Laura Simmons, vice president of MBS disclosure policy and operations for Fannie, said of the program, ""We believe that disclosing loan-level data is an important step towards meeting our investors' desire for enhanced transparency.""

Continuing her statements, Simmons added, ""In subsequent releases, we expect to be able to provide additional data elements in the loan-level at issuance file and provide monthly updates to the loan-level data.""

The first release of loan-level data files for single-family MBS will be downloadable and published under the ""New Issues Statistics"" tab in PoolTalk, which is a tool that retrieves pool-level information and data on Fannie Mae securities. Following the initial release, Fannie Mae stated it expects to provide initial data elements and monthly updates to the loan-level data.

Concurring with the release of the loan-level data will be new features on PoolTalk, including the ability to view data on a specific pool and monitor data for specific securities at a glance.

Daily issuance files, month statistics, and MBS-related documents will be accessible through PoolTalk.