Privacy of your information

At Loans.co.uk, we appreciate that your privacy is extremely important to you. With this in mind, we have put in place a number of measures to ensure that any personal data we obtain from you as a result of visiting this website is processed and maintained in accordance with accepted principles of good information handling and also in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998.

This statement provides you with details of the type of information we may hold about you, how we obtain and use any information and how we protect your privacy.

Obtaining Information

You are free to browse the website www.loans.co.uk without providing any personal or any other information whatsoever.

If however you wish to apply for any of our products and/or services then it will be necessary for us to collect information about you in order that we may consider your application further. This information is collected as follows:

Directly from you:

Personal information such as full names, date of birth, marital status, details of dependents etc.
Contact Information such as address, telephone numbers, email addresses etc.
Employment Information such as occupation, length of service, remuneration etc.
Financial Information such as details of any outstanding loans, mortgages and/or other credit.
This data is volunteered by you and collected via an online application form or alternatively you may print an offline pdf of html file and complete and return this via the Post.

From third parties
Information about you in support of your application. This may include references in respect of your employment, the conduct of any mortgage or loan accounts and also a search of the files of a credit reference agency.

Your actions on our site

This can show us for example which elements of the website you use most and least.

Use of Collected information

The information we collect about you will be recorded electronically and may be used in the following ways:

• To enable us to consider your application for a loan or other product or service.
• To contact you in connection with your enquiry.
• To extract certain information for the purpose of generating statistics for our own internal purposes - it will not however be possible to identify individuals from these statistics.
• To update our website to better meet our clients needs in the future.

Sometimes we'll share your information with carefully selected third parties outside Loans.co.uk Ltd. We may do this for the following reasons:

• To provide you with a mortgage or loan. As brokers, our products and services are provided in conjunction with our business partners. It will therefore be necessary to disclose your information to them to provide you with the products and/or services you require.
• To provide you with information about special promotions and offers. If you have given your consent by choosing not to opt out, we may share some of your information with carefully selected third parties so that they can provide you with information about products and services that may be of interest to you.
• To protect Loans.co.uk Ltd or others. We may share your information with third parties when we believe it is necessary to comply with the law or protect our or another person's rights, property, or safety. This includes exchanging information with third parties to protect against fraud and reduce payment risks.

We will only deal with third parties that we trust to act in our customers' best interests and who treat our customers' information with the same stringent controls that we apply ourselves.

As part of the regulatory activities carried out by the Finance Industry Standards Association (FISA) we may be asked to provide access to our records so that they may carry out an audit of our activities. If we disclose your personal information to the FISA they have each agreed with us that they will only use this information for the purposes of compliance with the Mortgage Code and Codes of Practice respectively and not for any other reason.

Methods of Contact

Unless you have advised us to the contrary, both we and any other broker, lender or third party referred to above may contact you by telephone, letter, e-mail or fax.

How Long Do We Keep Your Information?

How long we keep your information for depends on the basis on which it was provided and also on whether or not you have opted out either on the application form or at a subsequent time.

Generally however:

• We will keep the information that is necessary to enable us to provide you with a service that you have requested through this website for as long as it takes us to provide that service.
• We will keep your contact details for as long as we have your consent to send you marketing information and/or pass your contact details to third parties.
• We will keep records of any transactions you enter into on this website for a minimum of six years. This is so that we can respond to any complaints or disputes that arise in that period.
• We will keep other information about you if it is necessary for us to do so to comply with the law.

Your Consent and Rights of Access

We will only collect and store information about you, with your consent. You give us your consent by choosing to opt in or out on the application form and also by reading and acknowledging that you have read the "Declaration" and also "Disclosure and Use of Information" sections of the application form. You can change your mind and remove or add your consent at any time.

You have the right of access to your personal records or other information that Loans.co.uk Ltd holds about you. The charge for this service is £10 for each request.

If any data or information we hold about you is inaccurate or out of date then please let us know and this will be corrected immediately.

You can be deleted from our databases. Please note that this will not delete information held about you on other third party databases or information, which we are required to hold for legal or regulatory purposes.

To revise your consent, access, amend or delete your records you should contact the Data Protection Officer, Loans.co.uk Ltd, 6 Marlin House, Croxley Business Park, Watford, Herts. WD18 8TD
Telephone: 01923 652780 Email: nw@loans.co.uk

Security and Confidentiality

Appreciating that both privacy and security of your information is of the utmost importance, Loans.co.uk Ltd have implemented technology and security policies, rules and measures to protect the personal information we hold about you.

We protect your information by:

• Utilising an encryption and authentication process to protect our online services. This process ensures that information is scrambled before it is transmitted so that it remains private even if it is intercepted.
• Ensuring that your information is kept securely in our databases and offices. We only allow our employees and trusted contractors access to your information, and then only if they need it for a specific authorised task. The computers on which we store your information are kept in a secure environment.
• Ensuring that we only pass your personal data to third parties where security and confidentiality is assured.

We will take all reasonable steps to protect your information, but data can never be guaranteed 100% secure. Please note that we will not be liable for any breach of security unless we have been negligent.

Cookies

We may use third party advertising companies to serve ads on our behalf. These companies may employ cookies and action tags (also known as single pixel gifs or web beacons) to measure advertising effectiveness. Any information that these third parties collect via cookies and action tags is completely anonymous.

Links to other sites

This website may from time to time include links to other sites. We make every effort to provide links to high quality, reputable sites but we're not responsible for their privacy practices or, site content, or the services they offer.

Telephone calls

If you call any of the telephone numbers quoted on this website we may record your call. These recordings are used for training and quality control purposes to ensure that we continuously monitor and improve our customer service standards.

Aggregated information

We use aggregated customer information to help us understand how our website is performing commercially and what we can do to improve performance. We may provide this information to other companies, such as third party advertisers. This information does NOT include any personal details that can be used to identify individuals.

Children

Loans.co.uk Ltd do not knowingly collect data on or from children.

What this Privacy Policy does not cover

This policy does not apply to the practices of companies Loans.co.uk Ltd does not own or control, or to people Loans.co.uk Ltd does not employ or manage.

Changes in this Privacy Policy

Loans.co.uk Ltd may amend this privacy policy from time to time. If any amendments are made then a notice will be Posted on this website. This privacy policy was last updated on 19th August 2003.

Contact Details

Should you have any queries or require any information about this Privacy Statement or Loans.co.uk Ltd and the Data Protection Act then these should be directed to the Data Protection Officer, Loans.co.uk Ltd,
6 Marlin House, Croxley Business Park, Watford, Herts. WD18 8TD
Telephone: 01923 652780 Email: nw@loans.co.uk