Ted Tozer, Steward of Ginnie Mae for 7 Years, Departing

Ted Tozer will leave Ginnie Mae on Jan. 20 after nearly seven years as president of the secondary marketing agency.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, of which Ginnie is part, said that Tozer will be leaving at noon that day. He has served as president of Ginnie Mae since February 2010.

"His plans are to do what every other political appointee does," the spokeswoman said.

Nancy Corsiglia, who joined Ginnie Mae last July as executive vice president and chief operating officer, will be in charge until a new president is appointed by President-elect Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate.

The incoming Trump administration has not yet picked a successor for Tozer. Rumored candidates include Michael Bright, a director at the Milken Institute's Center for Financial Markets, where he leads the housing program; and Phillip Bracken, chief policy officer for government and industry relations at Radian Guaranty, the mortgage insurer.

As the head of Ginnie, which oversees securitizations of Federal Housing Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs loans, Tozer was instrumental in ensuring that the mortgage market not only functioned, but kept up with changes following the financial crisis.

He has pushed for greater oversight of nonbank lenders, which have picked up market share in government lending as large institutions pulled back. Tozer has been supportive of their growing role, but focused on making sure they were compliant and financially sound.

His biggest contribution was opening up the Ginnie program to independent mortgage bankers. Ginnie's portfolio of mortgage-backed securities guaranteed is approaching $1.8 trillion, up from roughly $450 billion in 2010. (The underlying loans are insured by other agencies; Ginnie makes sure interest and principal are paid to bondholders in a timely fashion.)

Tozer joined the agency a year after issuer Taylor, Bean & Whitaker collapsed in the wake of a massive fraud at the company; and a few years later, he defended the agency against inspector-general assertions that Ginnie and other agencies hadn't done enough to monitor its counterparty risk and react to breaches of TBW's contracts.

But he took several steps to improve Ginnie's counterparty risk management, including a scorecard system designed to measure issuers' performance metrics.

When he was nominated in 2009 by President Obama, Tozer was the senior vice president of capital markets for National City Mortgage, which PNC Financial Services Group had acquired in 2008. His experience with Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities went back to 1986.

Brian Collins, Kate Berry and Bonnie Sinnock contributed to this report