A Smaller Pool, A Similar Story: SCA's Clients vs. the ACES National Benchmark
Every quarter, ACES Quality Management publishes its Mortgage QC Industry Trends Report, a nationwide snapshot of post-closing quality control data pulled from the ACES Quality Management & Control platform. SCA ran a similar analysis based on its own clients' lender loan data, a much smaller, more curated regional slice of that larger market. Comparing the two Q4 2025 reports shows how the regional cohort stacks up against the broader industry and how closely the underlying risk patterns still track.
The big picture: SCA's clients are doing a lot better than average. Only 0.16% of the loans SCA reviewed last quarter had a critical defect. Nationally, that rate was 1.38%, roughly nine times higher. The gap held up over the full year too; SCA's clients stayed under half a percent every quarter, while the national average for the year was close to 1.5%. That's a meaningful difference. With around 100 lenders in SCA's pool, it likely reflects a mix of things: genuinely strong QC discipline, a different loan mix, and simply less volume for problems to surface in.
When problems did happen, they clustered in Legal/Regulatory/Compliance, the same category driving the national trend. For SCA's clients, 100% of critical defects in both Q3 and Q4 fell under Legal/Regulatory/Compliance (federal compliance specifically), though that rate did ease over the period. Nationally, the same category also became the single biggest source of defects, rising 30% (18.97% → 24.66%). ACES points to a likely cause: refinance loans are becoming more common again, and lenders are having to re-exercise compliance steps they haven't leaned on as heavily in a while. Across all other FNMA categories, SCA's pool had zero defects, while the national data still showed meaningful activity in Income/Employment (21.52%), Assets (15.25%), and Liabilities (10.76%).
Both datasets show the same broad shift toward eligibility-driven risk, though not every category moved together. In 2024, credit issues were the leading defect category for SCA's clients; by 2025, those had disappeared entirely. In their place, Legal/Regulatory/Compliance defects rose roughly fivefold (0.09% → 0.47%), and a new concern emerged: Borrower/Mortgage Eligibility, at 0.48%. Nationally, Borrower/Mortgage Eligibility defects rose even faster, up 291.58%, echoing SCA's pattern. Credit, though, ran the opposite direction nationally, rising 166.13% even as it vanished for SCA's clients. So while the move toward eligibility-driven risk shows up in both, SCA's clients avoided the credit-defect rebound the rest of the industry saw.
Refinance loans stood out as risk spots in both reports. For SCA's clients, refinance loans made up a smaller share of what got reviewed in 2025 (~13%), yet the refinance defect rate rose to 0.28%, the first time in five years that reviewed volume and defect rate moved in opposite directions. Nationally, refinance review share nearly doubled and defect share more than doubled.
Bottom line: SCA's clients have a much lower rate of critical defects than the industry as a whole. But when you look at where the mistakes do happen, the pattern closely tracks what's happening everywhere else, mostly around compliance paperwork, loan eligibility, and refinance loans. That's the real takeaway: even lenders performing well overall should keep an eye on those same trouble spots heading into 2026.
