Suitability is your documented reason a product suits a particular borrower: what they need, what else you weighed, and why the recommendation fits. It stays on the file for anyone who reviews the deal later. It's never sent to the client.
When You'd Use This
Fill this in for any deal before you'll need to attest that the recommendation was suitable, and revisit it whenever the borrower's situation changes materially. A renewal always starts a fresh assessment: an attestation made for the original placement, or for a different renewal shape, doesn't carry forward and shows as needing re-attestation.
Filling In Needs and Options Considered
Open Suitability from the deal's compliance record or from the Suitability tab in the Compliance Hub. The needs section asks a fixed set of questions: mortgage purpose, timeline horizon, rate and payment risk tolerance, how much prepayment flexibility matters, fixed-versus-variable preference, income stability, and exit strategy or expected life changes in your own words. At least one answered field is required before you can attest.
Options Considered is a free-form list underneath it: add a row per alternative you weighed, each with a lender, product, rate, and the reason it didn't win out. It's optional, but it's the part of the record that shows you compared more than one product rather than defaulting to the first offer.
Writing the Rationale
Rationale is the sentence-or-two explaining why the recommended product suits this borrower given what you recorded above. It's required before you can attest, along with at least one recorded need. You can also list material risks the borrower should be aware of; add each on its own line.
Attesting to the Assessment
Save Draft keeps your work without attesting. Attest Suitability locks it in under your name and the date, and is disabled until the needs and rationale requirements are met; if you try anyway, the server names exactly what's missing. An attested assessment shows who attested and when, right on the card.
What Editing an Attested One Does
Editing any field on an attested assessment resets its status back to Draft, not to stale, and clears who attested and when. It's a genuine re-do: attesting again re-records your name and the current date. The system keeps a change log of which sections moved on every save, so the history of who touched the assessment and when survives even though the row itself is overwritten in place.
Common Gotchas
- A select field you never chose and a text field you typed into and then cleared both count as unanswered; the completeness check only counts a need with real text in it.
- A renewal shows the prior assessment as attested-looking until you open it; it only flags as needing re-attestation once you check the deal, since the status itself doesn't visibly change until you act on it.
- Editing to fix a typo on an already-attested assessment still drops it back to Draft. There's no way to correct one field without re-attesting.
What to Do Next
- Tour the Compliance Record on a Deal to see where suitability sits alongside the file's other obligations.
- Send the Disclosures a Deal Requires for the disclosures that typically follow a suitability assessment.
- Compare lender options while you're building out what to record under Options Considered.
- Download the compliance file for a deal once suitability and everything else is attested and ready to hand over.