Completing the Statement of Credit Assistance (SOCA)
All Consumer Regulated loans under Best Interest Duty (BID) need to have a completed SOCA within Infynity. Completing the SOCA helps you meet Responsible Lending Obligations, NCCP (National Consumer Credit Protection), BID (Best Interest Duty), Conflict of Interest and demonstrates that you understand your clients’ requirements and objectives and that you are acting in their best interests.
The SOCA includes your preliminary assessment, credit proposal, product comparisons and your recommendations. It is valid for 90 days and must be signed by all clients before submitting the loan application with the lender.
The SOCA is created within the Loans & Products tab in Infynity, under the Best Interest Duty Application.
Best Interest Duty Application covers all Consumer Regulated loans. BID obligations apply to credit products provided to Client's for personal, domestic, or household purposes or for the purchase or improvement of residential investment property, eg. (but not limited to):
- Consumer residential loans (home loans, investment loans)
- Consumer personal loans (personal use loans)
- Consumer car loans, asset finance
BID introduces requirements and steps that are additional to the Responsible Lending Obligations and Brokers are required to comply with both.
All tabs within the SOCA are mandatory and need to be completed fully, starting with the Needs Analysis tab first.
The different tabs and sections that need to be completed within the SOCA supported by robust conversations will help you demonstrate your understanding of the clients’ requirements and support your recommendations.
• Needs Analysis - is all about understanding your clients’ requirements and objectives. What are their short, medium, and long term goals and loan requirements. Provide a story to reaffirm the customers’ requirements. If this is a refinance application, you will need to also complete the customer refinancing questions to fully understand their refinancing objectives.
• Loans Securities & Commentary - each section needs to be completed to demonstrate your understanding of your clients’ requirements and that you are acting in the client’s best interest, and you understand your client’s financial awareness and practises.
• Preferred Loan Features & Scenarios - this is where you prioritise your clients loan features and reasons for each feature, here you also enter in the product comparisons that you completed. Use the ‘’import scenario’’ option or if you are working on a consumer finance personal or car loan, you can ‘’add’’ in the product comparisons manually on this page.
• Recommendations - in this tab you will be making your lender and product recommendation and providing detailed commentary around your choice and why it meets their needs and objectives and is in their best interest.
• Surescore - is designed to assist brokers to improve the quality of submissions and gauge the likelihood of its success through to approval. SureScore assesses 80+ data points on every application to help you review and add any missing data to reduce assessment delays and increase your chances of a successful lender approval.
• Commissions/Conflict of Interest - here you disclose any upfront commissions for any additional recommended products like Honey Insurance or Smart Select utilities for example. You also need to provide comments regarding conflicts of interest. It is recommended that you do not leave this blank, but rather if it does not apply, then enter ‘’There is no conflict of interest” or ‘NA’. Leaving it blank could indicate that you missed this field. Be honest and transparent. Examples of conflict of interest might include but not limited to:
Are you the Broker and involved in one or more parts of their loan transaction (ie the Accountant/Financial Planner/Real Estate Agent etc)
Is the applicant a family member, friend or living within your household or in a property owned by you.
Are you writing your own loan
This page also discloses any referrers, disclose the referrer details on this loan and any upfront brokerage fees.
You must disclose any paid or non-paid referrers in SOCA (ensure to have a referrer agreement in Infynity – this applies to anyone registered with ABN).
One time or multiple time referrer agreement should be held in Infinity.
• Client forms – this is where you generate the Credit Quote (if charging a fee for service) and where you generate the SOCA document to send to your clients for signing. You can download the document and email to your clients or use esign (fee is applicable).
Use 
at the bottom right of each tab to save your entered data and move to the next tab to complete all the mandatory tabs, all the way through the SOCA process.
TIPS to prepare a good quality SOCA ready for your client/s signing:
The SOCA document demonstrates your interactions with your client/s, it is a mandatory document for all regulated loans.
Remember every client is different, every deal is different, so you need to have good, detailed comments for each relevant commentary section.
You complete the SOCA for and to your clients, so address your comments to your clients by using their names or indicating discussions held eg. “you have told me” and do not use Lending abbreviations or jargon in your comments.
All the information and commentary will populate into the SOCA for signing by all clients.
The SOCA is valid for 90 days.
The SOCA needs to represent the data submitted to the Lender, therefore if there are any changes to client details, financials etc, you need to make sure that you generate the correct SOCA with the relevant changes to finalise the SOCA ready for signing.
If changes are made to an application after it has been passed through to NextGen/ApplyOnline, changes then need to be manually made in ApplyOnline application unless the application is overwritten in Infynity. If you override, you will lose any saved work completed in ApplyOnline already.
SOCA Short Form can be used when the SOCA has exceeded 90 days and or an exemption is required to not complete a new SOCA due to changes (example pricing review). Refer to the SOCA short form for full criteria requirements. A copy of the signed SOCA short form must be uploaded into Infynity.
Upload all compliance and supporting documents to the Documents tab within Infynity against the loan application.
SOCA with Guarantors
It is important that you create your Client Account within Infynity, correctly from the beginning, this means creating the full client profile.
Create the client account via Accounts tab >> New Client Account
Ensure that you create the full client structure (ie all applicants and guarantors as required)
All clients regardless of the product type or structure must have a client account created in Infynity
The Compliance team have advised that the SOCA should only show the applicants. Outlined below is best practice for guarantor loans.
(1) Create your client account structure as normal in Infynity (show all applicants and guarantors).
(2) Add in the additional security being provided by the guarantors and assign the ownership of that asset to the guarantors as normal.
(3) Prepare your SOCA as normal
(4) Add all securities for the loan within the Loans, Securities & Commentary tab within the SOCA. Make good notes about the additional guarantor’s security (as there is no section for security within the SOCA document generated for signing)
(5) In the SOCA toggle on your applicant/s only, as they will be signing the SOCA and only their details and financial information will populate to the SOCA.
(6) Before passing through to the AOL, Edit the Loan application by using the “edit” option and toggle on all loan parties including the guarantors within the application.
(7) Pass the data through to AOL as normal – all loan party’s details (including the guarantors) will populate to the Lender’s application within AOL for your validation.
Upload all compliance and supporting documents to the Documents tab within Infynity against the loan application.
SOCA with Loan Splits
In this example, when you usually have one loan application that you are doing with the Lender but may have two or more loan splits as part of the application (eg. variable/fixed loan splits).
- In the SOCA, select one Loan Objective
- Create your loan splits as required by using the “add split” feature.
• Complete your product comparisons as a split loan and import the comparison into the SOCA as normal. Your split comparison needs to match the split requirements within the SOCA document.
• Under the recommendation tab select your Lender/Loans as normal
• Based on your objectives, the SOCA will produce one mortgage finance submission for you to submit which will have the loan splits within the one application.
Additional information and tips
Confirm with the Lender that the splits selected can be completed within the one application.
Splits are treated differently across the different Lenders.
Upload all compliance and supporting documents to the Documents tab within Infynity against the loan application.
SOCA with Multiple Loans
In this example when you usually have two different contracts, settling at different times, and or different purposes or application types (eg. full approval and preapproval), or where you want to application to stand alone, you would with most of the Lenders, be required to submit two separate loan applications, i.e. the land loan will be settled while the construction is preapproved.
Having one application for both would be problematic, as the application would have a settled status once the land loan went through but there is still a portion for the construction that needs to go through approval milestones.
Most lenders would have challenges reflecting this from a system perspective, therefore two (2)
applications would be required. You can however create the one (1) SOCA but selecting two (2) loan
objectives, which will create two (2) loan submissions to complete with the Lender.
• Select your multiple loan objectives within the SOCA (in this example is a land and construction loan scenario)
• Complete the two loan objectives/purposes within the loans, securities & commentary tab.
• Complete your product comparisons as individual comparisons for each loan submission requirement and import the comparison into the SOCA as normal against each loan.
• Under the recommendation tab select your Lender/Loans as normal, for each loan objective.
• Based on your objectives, the SOCA will produce two mortgage finance submissions. It could be multiple submissions to the same lender or could be to different lenders based on your recommendations
Additional information and tips
View and edit each submission before submitting to the Lender for example, via NextGen ApplyOnline (AOL)
Remember to link the multiple applications in AOL as required if using the same lender and or if this option is not available in AOL, have clear notes to indicate that there are multiple submissions that need to be assessed at the same time.
Upload all compliance and supporting documents to the Documents tab within Infynity against the loan application.
SOCA for Consumer Finance Loans/Asset Finance
In this example when you are working with a Consumer Personal loan or Asset Finance loan, you need to complete a SOCA.
- In the SOCA, select the Loan Objective from the Consumer Finance options.
- If a secured loan, add in your security type
- Complete your product comparisons manually for consumer finance loans, by using the “add” button to select the consumer finance lender/financier and complete the relevant product information for each Lender product. Best practice is for a min of 3 lender comparisons (same as if working with residential mortgage loans).
- Under the recommendation tab select your Lender/Loans as normal and complete the commentary.
- Based on your objective and recommended Lender/Financier, the SOCA will produce a consumer finance submission.
- The application will display as “misconfigured lender” this means that you need to submit your consumer finance application directly with the Lender/Financier through their portal.
Additional information and tips
Makes notes within Infynity that you have submitted directly via the Lender Financiers portal.
Make notes with the progress of the loan application and update the status of your loan application manually, as there is no back channel message received.
Upload all compliance and supporting documents to the Documents tab within Infynity against the loan application.
Education Tab | E-Learning
You can view additional recordings within the Education >> E-Learning tab within Infynity if you need a refresher on the process for completing a SOCA.
Disclaimer: This information is current as at the time of each QRG publication. It is a general information guide only