ICE launches residential whole loan evaluations service

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) announced on Wednesday the launch of a new service to provide evaluated pricing for individual residential whole loans, extending its pricing tools beyond securitized mortgage assets. The service, ICE Residential Whole Loan Evaluations, is designed to provide model-driven pricing for unsecuritized residential mortgages — including qualified mortgages, nonqualified mortgages (non-QMs) and specialty loans. Residential whole loans have grown as a segment of the fixed-income market but have not had the same pricing infrastructure available for securitized assets, the company said. The evaluations use ICE’s existing pricing process and are overseen by a team of evaluators. The methodology incorporates loan-level information provided by clients along with data and analytics from ICE’s mortgage and data businesses. These inputs include ICE’s AFT Prepayment and Credit Model, which projects prepayments, defaults and delinquencies; the ICE Home Price Index, which provides home price data across about 28,000 ZIP codes; and ICE origination data, which is updated daily from more than 3,000 lenders. The home price data is used to estimate current loan-to-value rat...