Canada's financial regulator issued draft guidelines on Monday for mortgage insurers to reduce risk in the housing market, a move analysts said could make it slightly harder for home buyers to get a loan. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) guidelines apply to the country's three mortgage insurance companies: the state-owned Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp (CMHC), which insures 70 percent of residential mortgages in the country, and private companies Genworth MI Canada and Canada Guaranty. The main thrust of the proposal for the C$730 billion ($664 billion ) industry is that insurers should be more proactive in ensuring that banks they deal with use sound mortgage underwriting practices. These include more rigorous income verification of borrowers similar to that used in the United States. OSFI imposed stricter mortgage underwriting guidelines for federally regulated banks in June 2012. Those rules governed relations between banks and borrowers.
↧