Privacy policy

What this policy covers

We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy policy will let you know how we look after your personal data and how the law protects you.

It is important that you read this privacy policy together with any other privacy policy or fair processing policy we may provide when we are collecting or processing personal data about you, so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data. This privacy policy supplements other notices and privacy policies and is not intended to override them.

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. This version was last updated on 09 August 2021.

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Who we are

etika Finance UK Ltd, trading under the name “etika”, is the data controller and responsible for your personal data (collectively referred to as “we”, “us” or “our” in this privacy policy).

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or our privacy practices, please contact our Nominated Contact for Data Protection via the following channels:
Email address: hello.uk@etika.com
Postal address:
etika Finance UK Ltd
PO Box 5600
Manchester
M61 0UX.

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How you can make a complaint

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk). We would, however, appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO so please contact us in the first instance.

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What data we collect about you

Personal data means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

We may process different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:

• Identity Data includes first name, maiden name, last name, username or similar identifier, marital status, title, date of birth and gender;
• Sensitive Data includes religion and health, including mental health, where this is relevant to your account and you have provided explicit consent to processing this information to help us manage your account;
• Contact Data includes a billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone numbers;
• Financial Data includes bank account and payment card details;
• Employment Data includes employment status, occupation, salary and any additional information to allow us to assess your creditworthiness and affordability;
• Transaction Data includes details about payments to and from you and other details of services you have purchased from us;
• Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, your login data, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform, and other technology on the devices you use to access this website;
• Profile Data includes your username and password, purchases or orders made by you, your interests, preferences, feedback and survey responses;
• Usage Data includes information about how you use our website, products and services, and;
• Marketing and Communications Data includes your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.

We also collect, use and share Aggregated Data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose. Aggregated Data could be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law as this data will not directly or indirectly reveal your identity. For example, we may aggregate your Usage Data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific website feature. However, if we combine or connect Aggregated Data with your personal data so that it can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal data which will be used in accordance with this privacy policy.

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If you fail to provide personal data

‍Where we need to collect personal data by law, or under the terms of a contract we have with you, and you fail to provide that data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you (for example, to check your eligibility for or product or provide you with goods or services). In this case, we may have to decline your request or cancel a product or service you have with us. We will notify you if this is the case at the time.
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‍Please inform us of changes in your data

‍It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. Please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us.

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How we collect your personal data

Whenever you interact with us, we collect data. Sometimes you provide us with data, sometimes data about you is collected automatically or from third parties.

Here is how and when we do this:

• You visit any page on our website
• You complete an online form
• You contact us via email, telephone or postal mail
• You opt into your marketing communications
• You interact with us on social media sites
• You register for a job alert on our website

We may also receive your personal data from the following third parties:

• You apply for credit through one of our affiliate merchants, in which case they will pass your data on to us
• We request data about you from credit referencing agencies in the context of a loan application from you. You can find out how credit reference agencies will process your data via the ‘Credit Reference Agency Information Notice’ (CRAIN). The credit reference agency we use is TransUnion (formally CallCredit) 1 Park Lane, Leeds, LS3 1EP and you can read their notice here https://www.transunion.co.uk/crain
• We look you up on social media sites in which case we may receive information that you have published on those sites
• Should you raise a Direct Debit indemnity claim, we may receive information from the company regarding this
• We may receive information about you from our mailing company.
• We may receive your personal information from the borrower, when your address will be provided for delivery purposes.

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How we use your personal data

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

• Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you.
• Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
• Where we need to comply with a legal obligation.
• Where you have given us consent

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Purposes for which we will use your personal data

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways in which we plan to use your personal data, and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so.Note that we may process your personal data for more than one lawful ground depending on the specific purpose for which we are using your data. Please contact us if you need details about the specific legal ground we are relying on to process your personal data where more than one ground has been set out in the table below.

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Lawful basis for processing

To perform a contract with you

• To process an application from you
• To check your eligibility for our products, for which we use profiling and automated decision-making, based on information obtained from various sources including credit referencing agencies.
• To provide products and services to you
• To arrange, underwrite and administer insurance and handle claims
• To manage our relationship with you. (for example, to discuss your account with you and send you regulatory and internal documents)

To comply with a legal obligation

• To meet our regulatory duty to verify your identity
• To comply with legal obligation

To pursue our legitimate interests

• To collect and recover money owed to we
• To use data analytics to improve our website, products/services, marketing, customer relationships and experiences
• To make suggestions and recommendations to you about goods, services or job opportunities that may be of interest to you
• To contact retailers from whom you have purchased goods or services through a loan from us, so that we can inform them that your loan with us has been paid off and discuss new offers we can provide to you
• To share the outcome of a soft credit check with the retailer, so that a retailer can contact you with a link and unique reference number to assist you with the submission of a loan application
• To administer and protect our business and this website (including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, system maintenance, support, reporting and hosting of data)
• To check your credit status and assess lending and insurance risk

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Identity and Fraud checks

‍We process and share information about you for identity and fraud checks. We will use and share that information about you with our fraud prevention provider, Hello Soda (Registered name Acuant UK Ltd). Hello Soda is an intelligent solution which may make decisions by automated means. 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 if you appear to have deliberately hidden your true identity. As part of the account opening process, we will ask you to take a selfie as well as submit a valid photo ID (such as passport) to allow us to verify your identity to use it to prevent fraud and money-laundering. These checks will be undertaken before we provide a product or service to you, and periodically at other stages of your journey with us after that. If fraud is detected at any time, you could be refused the product or service or have it withdrawn. We may also enable credit reference agencies and law enforcement agencies to access and use your personal information to detect, investigate and prevent crime. A record of any fraud or money laundering risk will be retained by Hello Soda, us, credit reference agencies and law enforcement agencies and may result in others refusing to provide services, financing or employment to you. When we process your personal information for the purposes above we do so to meet our legal obligations and to protect your identity as well as our business from fraud and money-laundering.
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Credit Bureau checks

‍In order to process your application we will supply some of your personal information to TransUnion International UK Limited, which is a credit reference agency providing services such as credit risk and affordability checking, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, identity verification and tracing. TransUnion will use your personal information to provide services to us and its other clients. We use their services in order to assess your creditworthiness and product suitability, check your identity, manage your account, trace and recover debts and prevent criminal activity such as fraud and money laundering. More information about TransUnion and the ways in which it uses and shares personal information can be found in its privacy notice at https://www.transunion.co.uk/legal/privacy-centre.

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Call recording

‍We want to provide you with the best possible service, so telephone calls to us may be recorded and/or monitored for quality checks and staff training. Recordings may also be used to help us combat fraud.

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Promotional offers from us‍

We may use your 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 will only send you marketing communications relating to products or services from third parties if you have given us consent to do so.

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Third-party marketing‍

We will get your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any third party for marketing purposes.

If you carry out a soft credit check application in respect to the purchase of particular goods, we will rely on our legitimate interest to share the outcome of the soft credit check with the retailer involved in the potential transaction, so that the retailer can assist you with the submission of a loan application.

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Opting out‍

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 you or by contacting us at any time via hello.uk@etika.com

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Cookies‍

Our website uses cookies. Unless you make changes to your browser settings to turn them off, we will issue cookies whenever you interact with our website. Some cookies delete themselves when you leave our website, others will not delete themselves and help us recognise you when you return. This helps us show you information we think you might be interested in.

For more information about the types of cookies we use, see our cookies policy

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With whom we may share your personal data

We will only use and share your information where it is necessary for us to lawfully carry out our business activities.

We may share your data on an on-going basis; routinely; or on an ad-hoc basis, for example in response to a particular event or requirement, depending on who we are sharing it with and why.

We will endeavour to share your data as securely as possible, for example by using appropriate security measures where appropriate.

We require all third parties to respect the security of your personal data and to treat it in accordance with the law. We do not allow our third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes and only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions.

We may share your data in the following ways:

• CRAIN - Credit referencing agencies: These are organisations that provide us with information about your credit history so that we can evaluate whether you are eligible for a product from us and verify information that you have provided to us as part of your application. We may also provide data to credit references agencies about your repayment history once you have taken a product out with us. You can find out how credit reference agencies will process your data via the ‘Credit Reference Agency Information Notice’ (CRAIN). The credit reference agency we use is TransUnion (formally CallCredit) 1 Park Lane, Leeds, LS3 1EP and you can read their notice here https://www.transunion.co.uk/crain
• Service providers: These companies or persons include a range of entities who provide a range of services to us. Specific examples include: IT and system administration services; hosting services (and cloud computing power and storage providers); and data analysis services. We may share your data with the mailing company that we use to deliver documents to you. Where data is shared with these entities, we take precautionary measures to endeavour to keep it secure and only share your data where there is a business need to do so.
• Marketing services: These are companies who help us with our marketing, but we will only share your data with them if we have your permission to do so. You can opt out of marketing at any time by contacting us.
• Debt Collection Agencies: These are companies who provide an external service of debt collection for accounts that have not been paid. The Debt Collection Agency that we use is ARC (Europe) Limited, Kent House, Churchfield Road, Walton on Themes, Surrey, KT12 2TU. We may share your data with ARC in order to allow them to contact you in pursuit of any debt you owe us.
• Tracing Agencies: These are companies who provide a service to help locate customers who we have lost contact with, who have money outstanding with us. The agencies use a range of information to locate missing individuals and we may share your information to support their search.
• Professional advisers: There may be a requirement for us to share your data with a range of professionals to allow us to deliver our services to you and support the broader running of our business. This includes lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers based in the UK who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services to us.
• Authorities: Where we have a legal and/or regulatory obligation to do so, we may disclose necessary information to authorities such as the police, tax agencies, fraud prevention agencies or other such relevant authorities. This can be for a range of purposes including to support the detection and investigation of crime, including financial crime, such as fraud and money laundering.
• Retailers: These are companies from whom you bought products and services with the help of a loan from us. From time to time we may contact such retailers to tell them when your loan has been paid off and discuss new offers that we can provide to you. Should the situation arise, we may also discuss your details with retailers during the course of a complaint that you may raise.
• Internally within our organisation: we may share your information between our departments for a range of purposes, for example to help us deliver our service to you, including for internal training and monitoring. This may include sharing your data with any associated companies that we may have, where appropriate.
• Third parties chosen by you: if you give us permission to do so, we may share your data in this way (for example, through a formal Power of Attorney arrangement).
• Other relevant companies: we may share your data with people or companies if there is a restructure, merger, acquisition or takeover of our business.
• Other: Where permitted by law, where it is necessary for our legitimate interests or those of a third party, and where it is not inconsistent with the purposes listed above.

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Where your data will be located

The data that we collect from you will be stored in the European Economic Area (EEA). Some of our service providers are based outside the EEA so their processing of your personal data will involve a transfer of data outside the EEA. These are companies that help us with the management of our services, security of data integrity, avoidance of platform failover and monitoring of service status.  Currently, these companies process data for us in the US, Canada and Australia mainly.

Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the EEA, we ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it by ensuring at least one of the following safeguards is implemented:

• We will transfer your personal data to countries that have been deemed to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data by the European Commission.
• We may use specific contracts approved by the European Commission which give personal data the same protection it has in Europe.
• Where we use providers based in the US, we may transfer data to them if they are part of the Privacy Shield which requires them to provide similar protection to personal data shared between Europe and the US.
• Please contact us if you want further information on the specific mechanism used by us when transferring your personal data out of the EEA.

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How we keep your data safe

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.  Amongst others, this includes the use of secure socket layer (SSL) encryption technology. We also use firewalls and other security technologies to protect our servers from external attack.

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.

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For how long we will use your data

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 keep basic information about our customers (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for six years after they cease being customers for tax purposes and to be able to respond to any legal claims that are served with the six-year limitation.

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.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see the section “Your Legal Rights” below for further information.

In some circumstances, we will anonymize 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.

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Your legal rights

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data:

• Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
• Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.
• Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law. Note, however, that we may not always be able to comply with your request of erasure for specific legal reasons which will be notified to you, if applicable, at the time of your request.
• Object to the processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which overrides your rights and freedoms.
• Request restriction of processing of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios:
  • If you want us to establish the data’s accuracy.
  • Where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it.
  • Where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
  • You have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.
• Request the transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.
• Withdraw consent at any time where we are relying on consent to process your personal data. However, this will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before you withdraw your consent. If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. We will advise you if this is the case at the time you withdraw your consent.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us at hello.uk@etika.com.

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No fee usually required‍

You will not have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request is clearly unfounded, repetitive or excessive. Alternatively, we could refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

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What we may need from you‍

We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access your personal data (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is a security measure to ensure that personal data is not disclosed to any person who has no right to receive it. We may also contact you to ask you for further information in relation to your request to speed up our response.
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‍Time limit to respond‍

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it could take us longer than a month if your request is particularly complex or you have made a number of requests. In this case, we will notify you and keep you updated.

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Third-party links

This website may include links to third-party websites, plug-ins and applications. Clicking on those links or enabling those connections may allow third parties to collect or share data about you. We do not control these third-party websites and are not responsible for their privacy statements. When you leave our website, we encourage you to read the privacy policy of every website you visit.

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