— This paper studies a novel iterative soft interference cancellation (SIC) aided beamforming receiver designed for highthroughput quadrature amplitude modulation systems communicating over additive white Gaussian noise channels. The proposed linear SIC aided minimum symbol error rate (MSER) multiuser detection scheme guarantees the direct and explicit minimisation of the symbol error rate at the output of the detector. Based on the extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart technique, we compare the EXIT characteristics of an iterative MSER multiuser detector (MUD) with those of the conventional minimum mean squared error (MMSE) detector. As expected, the proposed SICMSER MUD outperforms the SIC aided MMSE MUD.