LTVtrade adds John D. Koch to its Board of Advisors

NEW YORK, July 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- LTVtrade® announced today that John D. Koch, Chairman and CEO of ION Financial, Inc. and former EVP and Chief Lending Officer at Charter One Bank joins LTVtrade as it prepares to launch the LTVtrade Marketplace for residential whole loan mortgage and residential Real Estate Owned (REO) trading.

"LTVtrade is honored to add John Koch to our Board of Advisors," said Dean DiCarlo, President and Founder of LTVtrade. "John has deep expertise in the mortgage banking and asset management arenas and in operating environments from entrepreneurial start-ups to large institutions such as Charter One Bank. His unique blend of expertise and experience will help guide LTVtrade's product and market development." Charter One was among the top 25 largest banks in the U.S. prior to its acquisition by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2004.

Since the 2008 housing downturn, the landscape of the housing finance industry has been slowly reshaping itself and adjusting to regulatory changes and uncertainty still pervasive today. In an April 4, 2012 speech before the Boston Security Analysts Society, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Acting Director, Edward J. DeMarco, stated "We have seen a great deal of concentration in mortgage origination and in mortgage servicing in recent years." In fact, just one bank, Wells Fargo, originated home loans worth $130 billion over the first quarter of 2012 – equal to 33.9% of the total $385 billion of mortgage loans handed out by all U.S. banks in the same period.

"LTVtrade's long term vision is to provide a neutral, centralized platform to connect small and large mortgage lenders with whole loan investors in a performing loan market," stated Koch, "and this should greatly help the housing market as there are many credit-worthy borrowers today which do not fit Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac guidelines – yet it's impossible for investors to efficiently access them on any scale."

According to a report to Congress entitled "Reforming America's Housing Finance Market" and authored by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and released in 2011, "private markets - subject to strong oversight and standards for consumer and investor protection - will be the primary source of mortgage credit and bear the burden for losses."

In February of 2012, DeMarco sent Congress a strategic plan for the next phase of conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises) which included among its strategic goals the Agency's plan to build a new infrastructure for the secondary mortgage market under a "public utility" construct. DeMarco's letter further stated that "the platform itself will be one way American taxpayers realize a return on their substantial investment in the Enterprises."

LTVTrade's innovative Marketplace platform will demonstrate the market is most successful when private enterprise is able to do what it does without government interference. LTVtrade offers an ideal solution to help reinvigorate the housing finance market as the role of the Enterprises is diminished and/or reformed. For additional information on LTVtrade, please visit www.ltvtrade.com.

About LTVtrade: LTVtrade® seeks to alter the business of residential whole loan mortgage and residential REO trading through the LTVtrade™ Marketplace - an open, accessible, and transparent, secondary market platform which focuses on meeting the needs of the largest and smallest financial institutions, small local funds and savvy accredited investors. The LTVtrade™ Services Continuum enhances the trading experience by providing buyers and sellers with access to a network of industry experts and best-in-class service providers.

SOURCE LTVtrade