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Borrower Privacy Policy & Terms
At Property Finance Direct we take privacy seriously and we are committed to protecting it.
This policy explains when and why we collect personal information about individuals, how this information is used, the conditions under which it may be disclosed to others and how it is kept secure.
We are made up of a number of individual companies. Property Finance Direct is a trading name of Seek4 (Company number 14870251) and our associated companies – please see the end of this Privacy Policy for a list of our associated companies. Whenever dealing with us in respect of an application for funding and any subsequent financing to you, the controller of your personal information will be the company that is dealing with your application and (if applicable) with which you enter into a funding agreement. Property Finance Direct may carry out administrative functions relevant to your application (such as credit checks), in which case it will also be a controller of your personal information.
If our customer is a corporate entity, we may collect personal data about you from our customer (for example, we may collect information about directors and other relevant individuals of the customer). References in this policy to “you” is a reference to the individual whose personal data we have collected, whether directly from you as the individual, or from our customer who is a corporate entity.
INFORMATION WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU
We collect information about you at various stages during our relationship with you, including when you or our corporate customer make an application to us, when we enter into an agreement with you/ our corporate customer, during the course of providing our services to you/ our corporate customer and on other occasions when you contact us or when we ask for information.
Personal information you give to us: The personal information that we collect about you from you, your broker or our solicitor (as applicable) is as follows:
name
date of birth
residential address and address history
contact details such as email address and telephone numbers
financial information, including bank statements and details of your assets
employment details
information contained in identification documents, including passport, driving licence and household bills
information provided by you when filling in a form on our website
details contained in your application to us
details of the account you have with us
your marketing preferences
Personal information we receive from other sources: We obtain certain personal information about you from other sources, as follows:
information we receive following enquiries we make with your current and previous lenders, employers, estate agents, landlords, accountants, bankers and the UK Finance Mortgage Lenders Possession Register;
information we receive following enquiries we make with credit reference and fraud prevention agencies – please see ‘Use by credit reference and fraud prevention agencies’ below for further information; and
publicly available information obtained from the Internet and other sources such as The Insolvency Service, HM Land Registry, HM Revenue and Customs, Companies House, The Gazette, the electoral register and other public sources.
If you fail to provide us with any mandatory information that we request from you when you apply to us, we will not be able to proceed with the checks and risk assessment necessary to enter into a contract with you; we will not be able to consider your application nor propose an offer to you.
USE OF YOUR INFORMATION
The purposes for which we use your information and the legal bases under data protection laws on which we rely to do this are as follows (as relevant):
Performance of the contract with you or to take steps to enter into it. This includes verifying your identity, assessing your/ our corporate customer’s application, underwriting, and, if we enter into an agreement with you/ our corporate customer, administering the agreement including tracing your whereabouts to contact you and recover debt and to provide you with the service under that agreement (i.e. managing your account, communicating with you, providing updates on the status of your account, dealing with any complaints and notifying you of any changes to this Privacy Policy).
Our legitimate interests or that of a third party for the following purposes:
to assess your application and any lending risks, this includes analysing the information we receive from credit reference agencies to assess and understand your payment performance;
to make decisions on credit, loan arrangements and other services;
to prevent fraud and money laundering, and to verify your identity, in order to protect our business and to comply with laws that apply to us;
for management and audit of our business operations including statistical analysis and accounting;
to enhance and personalise your customer experience by analysing patterns and customer behaviours, including contacting you to ask you about your experiences (we may engage a market research company to contact you on our behalf);
to carry out statistical analysis to help with decisions about credit and account management;
to recover debt, for repossession, and trace your whereabouts;
to monitor communications between us to prevent and detect crime, to protect the security of our communications, systems and procedures, and for quality control and training purposes;
to carry out marketing activities (other than where we rely on your consent) e.g. to tailor marketing communications or send targeted marketing messages via social media and other third party platforms; and
for network and information security in order for us to take steps to protect your information against loss, damage, theft or unauthorised access.
The funder of the proposed facility will receive certain information about you (see ‘Use by third parties’ below) and relies on its legitimate interests to carry out its assessment of any lending risks in order to protect its business and to better understand the profile of the borrower and its ability to repay.
Any security party named in the security documents (and its legal advisers) where this is relevant to the facility taken by you/ our corporate customer will receive all of the information we have obtained about you for its legitimate interest of obtaining separate independent legal advice to allow it to assess any risks and decide whether to proceed in its role as security party.
Compliance with a legal obligation. This includes when you exercise your legal rights under data protection law, to verify your identity, for the establishment and defence of our legal rights, for activities relating to the prevention, detection and investigation of crime, to conduct credit, fraud prevention and anti-money laundering checks and for compliance with our legal and regulatory responsibilities. This may also include processing special categories of data about you, for example for our compliance with our legal obligations relating to vulnerable people.
Consent. Where we have your consent to use it for direct marketing communications (by us and/or any third parties referred to in the relevant consent request). You can withdraw your consent to marketing at any time by following the unsubscribe instructions in the relevant communication.
AUTOMATED DECISIONS
As part of our processing of your personal information, we may take decisions by automated means.
In regard to fraud prevention checks, you may automatically be considered to pose a fraud or money laundering risk if our processing reveals your behaviour to be:
consistent with that of known fraudsters or money launderers;
inconsistent with your previous submissions; or
you appear to have deliberately hidden your true identity.
USE BY CREDIT REFERENCE AND FRAUD PREVENTION AGENCIES
In order to process your application, we will perform credit and identity checks on you with one or more credit reference agencies (“CRAs”). We may carry out further periodic searches in the management of your account.
To do this, we will supply your personal information to CRAs and they will give us information about you. This will include information from your credit application and about your financial situation and financial history. CRAs will supply to us both public (including the electoral register) and shared credit, financial situation and financial history information and fraud prevention information.
We will use this information to:
assess your creditworthiness and whether you can afford to take the product;
verify the accuracy of the data you have provided to us;
prevent criminal activity, fraud and money laundering;
manage your account(s);
trace and recover debts; and
ensure any offers provided to you are appropriate to your circumstances.
We will continue to exchange information about you with CRAs while you have a relationship with us. We will also inform the CRAs about your settled accounts. If you borrow and do not repay in full and on time, CRAs will record the outstanding debt. This information may be supplied to other organisations by CRAs.
When CRAs receive a search from us they will place a search footprint on your credit file that may be seen by other lenders.
If you are making a joint application, or tell us that you have a spouse or financial associate, we will link your records together, so you should make sure you discuss this with them, and share with them this information, before lodging the application. CRAs will also link your records together and these links will remain on your and their files until such time as you or your partner successfully files for a disassociation with the CRAs to break that link.
The identities of the CRAs, their role also as fraud prevention agencies, the data they hold, the ways in which they use and share personal information, data retention periods and your data protection rights with the CRAs are explained in more detail at http://www.experian.co.uk/crain/index.html. CRAIN is also accessible from each of the three CRAs – clicking on any of these three links will also take you to the same CRAIN document: Callcredit https://www.callcredit.co.uk/crain; Equifaxhttps://www.equifax.co.uk/crain.html; Experian http://www.experian.co.uk/crain/index.html.
Before we provide services, goods or financing to you, we undertake checks for the purposes of preventing fraud and money laundering, and to verify your identity. These checks require us to process your information. If we, or a fraud prevention agency, determine that you pose a fraud or money laundering risk, we may refuse to provide the services and financing you have requested or we may stop providing existing services to you. A record of any fraud or money laundering risk will be retained by the fraud prevention agencies, and may result in others refusing to provide services, financing or employment to you. If you have any questions about this, please contact us on the details above.
Please telephone us on 0844 415 6500 if you would like details of the credit reference and fraud prevention agencies from whom we obtain and to whom we pass information about you. You have a legal right to these details.
USE BY THIRD PARTIES
We disclose your information to the following third parties:
Your broker, who assists us with administering your application.
The funder(s) of the proposed facility to you. Funders receive personal information that is necessary for them to undertake ‘Know Your Client’ checks, as such we will provide them with the information on your application form and the results of the checks that we carry out. The funder will also receive further information during the course of our relationship with you, where this is necessary to the funding provided to you.
As applicable, our associated companies who will process personal information in accordance with this Privacy Policy.
Any security party named in the security documents (and its legal advisers) where this is relevant to the facility taken by you/ our corporate customer so that the security party can obtain separate independent legal advice.
Where you are located outside of the UK, we will appoint a solicitor in your local jurisdiction to provide us with advice in relation to your circumstances according to the laws of the relevant jurisdiction.
Credit reference agencies and fraud prevention agencies. Please see ‘Use by credit reference and fraud prevention agencies’ above for further information about these agencies and what they do.
Third party suppliers engaged by us to undertake certain services, including debt collecting agencies to recover monies owed to us and fine administration. These third parties will also be controllers of your information and are solely responsible for protecting your personal data and processing it in line with data protection laws.
Third parties acting on our behalf, such as back-up and server hosting providers, IT software and maintenance providers and their agents, and third parties that provide customer support services, claims handling services, income verification services, affordability checks, communication fulfilment services and market research agencies.
Law enforcement agencies in order to detect, investigate and prevent crime (we or any fraud prevention agency may pass your information to law enforcement agencies).
Courts in the United Kingdom or abroad as necessary to comply with a legal requirement, for the administration of justice, to protect vital interests and to protect the security or integrity of our business operations.
Any third party who is restructuring, selling or acquiring some or all of our business or assets or otherwise in the event of a merger, re-organisation or similar event, including where we transfer your agreement to a third party.
Any third party to whom we sell your debt. If we do this, you will be notified and that third party will become the data controller of your information.
Our professional advisors, auditors and regulators as necessary.
WHERE WE STORE YOUR INFORMATION/ TRANSFERS TO THIRD COUNTRIES
We store your information on servers located in the United Kingdom.
The third parties listed under ‘Use by third parties’ may be located outside of the UK or the EEA or they may transfer your information outside of the UK or EEA. Those countries may not have the same standards of data protection and privacy laws as in the UK. Whenever we transfer your information outside of the UK, we ensure that your personal data is protected to the standard required under applicable data protection laws, including imposing contractual obligations on the recipients of your information or requiring the recipient to subscribe to ‘international frameworks’ intended to enable secure data sharing. Any third parties transferring your information outside of the UK or EEA must also have in place appropriate safeguards as required under applicable data protection laws.
RETENTION OF YOUR INFORMATION
If we decline your application or if we accept your application but you do not/ the corporate customer does not proceed with the facility, we keep your information for 12 months or as long as necessary to deal with any queries you may have and/or to comply with our legal obligations. If your application is accepted and you proceed, we hold your information for 6 years from the date at which your agreement ends or as long as necessary thereafter to deal with any queries you may have or to comply with our legal obligations.
Credit reference agencies will retain the account information we give to them for 6 years after your account is closed (please see ‘Use by credit reference and fraud prevention agencies’ for more information about the information that we give to them).
Fraud prevention agencies can hold your information for different periods of time, and if you are considered to pose a fraud or money laundering risk, your information can be held for up to 6 years.
We may hold your information for a longer or shorter period from that described above where:
the law requires us to hold your personal information for a longer period, or delete it sooner;
you exercise your right to have the information erased (where it applies) and we do not need to hold it in connection with any of the reasons permitted or required under the law; and
in limited cases, the law permits us to keep your personal information indefinitely provided we put certain protections in place.
YOUR RIGHTS
You have a number of rights in relation to your personal information under data protection laws. In relation to certain rights, we may ask you for information to confirm your identity and, where applicable, to help us to search for your personal information. Except in rare cases, we will respond to you within one month after we have received this information or, where this is not required, after we have received your request.
If you would like to exercise any of your rights, please contact us using the details below under ‘Contacting us’.
Your rights are as follows:
To be informed about the processing of your information.This is what this Privacy Policy sets out to do.
Accessing your personal information.You have the right to ask for a copy of the information that we hold about you. We may not provide you with a copy of your personal information if this concerns other individuals or we have another lawful reason to withhold that information.
Correcting and updating your personal information.The accuracy of your information is important to us. If you change any of your details, or you discover that any of the other information we hold about you is inaccurate or out of date, please let us know. We encourage you to keep us up to date in changes in your information to keep it safe and to keep your credit file up to date and consistent as it could affect other lender’s assessments of any applications you make.
Withdrawing your consent.Where we rely on your consent as the legal basis for processing your personal information, as set out under ‘Use of your information’, you may withdraw your consent at any time. If you would like to opt out of direct marketing from us, please follow the unsubscribe instructions in the relevant marketing communication. If you withdraw your consent, our use of your personal information before you withdraw is still lawful.
Objecting to our use of your personal information.Where we rely on our legitimate interests as the legal basis for processing your personal information for any purposes, as set out under ‘Use of your information’, you may object to us using your personal information for these purposes. Except for the purposes for which we are sure we can continue to process your personal information, we will temporarily stop processing your personal information in line with your objection until we have investigated the matter. If we agree that your objection is justified in accordance with your rights under data protection laws, we will permanently stop using your data for those purposes. Otherwise we will provide you with our justification as to why we need to continue using your data for our legitimate interests. You may object to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes and we will automatically comply with your request. If you would like to do so, please use our unsubscribe tool, if applicable.
Objecting to automated decisions made about you.You may contest a decision made about you based on automated processing.
Erasing your personal information or restricting its processing. In certain circumstances, you may ask for your personal information to be removed from our systems. Provided we do not have any continuing lawful reason to continue processing or holding your personal information, we will make reasonable efforts to comply with your request. You may also ask us to restrict processing your personal information where you believe it is unlawful for us to do so, you have objected to its use and our investigation is pending or you require us to keep it in connection with legal proceedings. We may only process your personal information whilst its processing is restricted if we have your consent or are legally permitted to do so, for example for storage purposes, to protect the rights of another individual or company or in connection with legal proceedings.
Transferring your personal information in a structured data file.Where we rely on your consent as the legal basis for processing your personal information or need to process it in connection with a contract with have with you, you may ask us to provide you with a copy of that information in a structured data file. We will provide this to you electronically in a structured, commonly used and machine readable form, such as a CSV file.
You can ask us to send your personal information directly to another service provider, and we will do so if this is technically possible. We may not provide you with a copy of your personal information if this concerns other individuals or we have another lawful reason to withhold that information.
You have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) if you are concerned about the way we have processed your personal information. Please visit the ICO’s website for further details.
CHANGES TO THIS PRIVACY POLICY
Please note that this Privacy Policy will be reviewed, and may change, from time to time. If necessary, we may notify you via email or post with our updated Privacy Policy.
CONTACTING US
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or the way in which we use your personal information, or if you would like to exercise any of your rights set out above, please contact us using any of the following details:
Email: Data Protection Officer, info@propertyfinancedirect.co.uk with the subject heading ‘Data Protection’
Post: FAO: Data Protection Officer, Property Finance Direct Limited, ........ , ........ ,
Phone: 0844 415 ...
List of associated companies:
Seek4 Ltd (Company number 14870251)
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