Soft and hard searches

Soft Search:

The lender can see a snapshot of the applicant's file. This is essentially a glance of information such as accounts, visible searches and public data. All lenders must conduct a hard search once an initial decision has been reached, if that is the purpose of the soft check. The reason that soft checks are not visible to other lenders, is because they are not intended to be used for credit applications, but can be used for quotations and approval likelihood. The difference between the two searches is more how they are conducted than the actual data received. A lender cannot conduct advanced analysis of your credit file when registering the search as quotation based, once they want to confirm their initial decision with a deeper inspection, it must be registered again but as a credit application search.

It would be against guidelines for a lender to perform a full credit check and then register it as a quotation search, as it is essentially lying. If this were allowed, all lenders would use "soft credit applications" as a marketing strategy to attract more customers. Even if a lender tries to advertise a soft check as an actual application, for example taglined as "Receive a decision without affecting your credit score" etc. they will at some point in the application perform a hard search. We all hate hard searches, but they are in place for a number of important reasons. Only agree to a full credit check when confident of the product in question.

Hard Search:

The lender inspects all the visible data points of the applicant's file to make an accurate and informed decision. This includes open and closed accounts with their associated records dating as far back as 71 months, all unexpired hard searches, MODA (for eligible members), CIFAS warnings, Notice of Corrections, public data, overindebtedness assessments by CallCredit (for eligible members) followed by the lender's own checks against fraud databases e.g National Hunter, electoral roll cross-referencing, identity checks and anti money-laundering regulatory checks.