LAWFUL BASIS FOR PROCESSING

We only process your data (which may include providing it to a third party) where we have identified a valid lawful basis to do so. These are as follows:

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1. Contractual obligation – means processing that is necessary to comply with our obligations arising out of a contract, for example, where you have bought services from us we will use the personal data you provide to fulfil our contractual obligations . 

2. Legitimate Interest -  means in the interest of our business in conducting and managing our business to enable us to give you the best service/product and the best and most secure experience. We make sure we consider and balance any potential impact on you (both positive and negative) and your rights before we process you personal data for our legitimate interests. Where we use legitimate interests we will record our decision on making this decision. We rely on legitimate interest where processing of the data we hold on you does not, in our opinion, affect your rights or freedoms and is proportionate to our interests e.g. keeping you up to date with our latest services or obtaining your feedback on our service.  

3. Consent – We will seek to obtain your consent to process:

   • your data outside our contractual obligations (see above) unless we have identified a Legitimate Interest (see above); and

   • any special category data. 

4. Legal obligation – We may process your data where we it is necessary for us to do so to comply with the law. 
    

THIRD PARTIES AND SHARING INFORMATION

We will keep your information within the organisation except where disclosure is required or permitted by law or when we use third party service providers (data processors) to supply and support our services to you.  We have contracts in place with our data processors. This means that they cannot do anything with your personal data unless we have instructed them to do so. They will not share your personal data with any organisation apart from us. They will hold it securely and retain it for the period we instruct.

 

This is a list which sets out the categories of recipients of personal data:

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• IT Support Services

• Email Provider

• Website Provider    

• Secure document disposal service    

• Banks    

• Online payment providers    

• Accountants    

• Insurers    

• Solicitors    

• Software Providers    

• Feedback aggregators and collectors    

• Couriers     

• Marketing Agencies    

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These organisations may be within the UK, the EEA, or outside the UK/EEA

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We may disclose your Personal Data to any competent law enforcement body, regulator, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary: (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights, or (iii) to protect your vital interests or those of any other person.
 

We may also be required to share your Personal Data as part of any sale, transfer or merger of our business or assets (or parts thereof). Such disclosure will be subject to the buyer’s processing of your Personal Data on terms equal to the protections afforded to you by this policy.
In addition, third parties may provide us with personal data and they should only do so where the law allows them to. 
 

INFORMATION SECRUITY

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information that we collect and process about you.  The measures we use are designed to provide a level of security appropriate to the risk of processing your personal information.

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MARKETING

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We may use your Identity, Contact, Technical, Usage and Profile Data to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you.  This is how we decide which products, services and offers may be relevant for you (we call this marketing).

You will receive marketing communications from us if you have requested information from us or purchased services from us and you have not opted out of receiving that marketing.
 

We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, namely around marketing and advertising. In particular: 

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• We will always obtain your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any third party for marketing purposes; and

• You can ask us or third parties to stop sending you marketing messages at any time by following the opt-out links on any marketing message sent to your or by contacting us at any time

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INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS

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Your data is stored by us and our processors in the UK. However, several of our external third parties are based outside the UK. Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the UK, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented. We will either:

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• transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the European Commission; or

• ensure that standard contractual clauses (SCCs) or, International Data Transfers Agreements (IDTAs) as required by law from time to time are in place and we have received assurances that an adequate level of protection of the personal data is achieved (based on a case by case assessment of the circumstances of the transfer), including adequate technical and operational measures in place to protect the personal data. 
   

Please contact us if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the EEA. 
 

DATA SECURITY

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We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.
 

We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.
 

DATA RETENTION

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We will only retain your personal data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements. We may retain your personal data for a longer period in the event of a complaint or if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation in respect to our relationship with you.
 

To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.
 

By law we have to keep basic information about our clients (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for 6 years after they cease being clients.
 

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data (see below for further information).
 

We may anonymise your personal data (so that it can no longer be associated with you) for research or statistical purposes, in which case we may use this information indefinitely without further notice to you. Please see earlier clause

 

YOUR RIGHTS

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Under the data protection laws your rights are:

 

• To be informed – We must make this privacy policy (sometimes referred to as a privacy notice) available to you and be transparent over how we process your data

• Access – You are entitled to know what details we hold about you and why. We strive to be as open as we can be in terms of giving people access to their personal data. You can find out if we hold any of their personal data by making a formal request under the data protection laws. Such requests should be made using the contact details provided in this policy. If we do not hold information about you we will confirm this in writing at the earliest opportunity. If we do hold your personal data we will respond in writing. Our response will:

  • confirm that your data is being processed;

  • verify the lawfulness and the purpose of the processing;

  • confirm the categories of personal data being processed;

  • confirm the type of recipient to whom the personal data have been or will be disclosed; and

  • let you have a copy of the data in format we deem suitable or as reasonably required by you

• Rectification – We are obliged to correct or update your details. We will correct or update your data without delay provided you make the request in writing to the contact details provided in this policy, clearly specifying which data is incorrect or out of date.

• Erasure – This is also known as the right to be forgotten. Under Data Protection Laws you have the right to require us to erase your personal data under specific circumstances. A request for your personal data to be deleted will be decided on a case by case basis and should be submitted in writing to the contact details provided in this policy.

• Restrict processing – You have the right to ‘block’ or suppress the processing by us of your personal data. 

• Portability – You have the right to obtain the personal data that you have provided to us in a commonly used machine-readable format and reuse it with a different provider. 

• Object – You have the right to object to us processing your data in certain circumstances. You have an absolute right to stop your data being used for direct marketing, but in other circumstances we may still be allowed (or required) to process your personal data if we can show you that we have a compelling reason for doing so. 

• Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling – We do not use automatic decision making or profiling. 

• Withdraw consent. Where you have given us consent to process your personal data, you can withdraw that consent at any time either by contacting us using the details set out in this policy, or by following the opt-out links in electronic messages where relevant. We do not penalise individuals who wish to withdraw consent and we act on withdrawals of consent as soon as we can. 

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Please note that:

 

• in certain circumstances Data Protection Laws may relieve us of some of our obligations to you under the rights summarised above; and 

• you may need to provide identification in order to prove who you are if you wish to invoke any of your rights as provided by the data protection laws and as summarised above.
   

If you agree, we will try to deal with your request informally, for example by providing you with the specific information you need over the telephone.

 

CHANGES TO THE PRIVACY POLICY 

 

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. This version was last updated on December 2023.