Privacy Notice
This privacy notice explains how we use any personal information we collect about you.
What information do we collect about you?
We collect information about you when you engage us for financial planning, financial advice, mortgage advice and investment management services. This information will relate to your personal and financial circumstances. It may also include special categories of personal data such as data about your health, if this is necessary for the provision of our services.
We may also collect your personal information when you voluntarily complete client surveys, provide feedback to us, submit an enquiry or submit a job application. We will collect details including but not limited to your name and contact details (together with your email address) and other relevant information about your financial history or from your CV. On occasions this may also include sensitive personal information such as details of criminal convictions and ethnic origin.
Information relating to usage of our website is collected using cookies. These are text files placed on your computer to collect standard internet log information and visitor behaviour information. We’ll use your information collected from the website to personalise your repeat visits to the site.
Information about connected individuals
We may need to gather personal information about your close family members and dependants in order to provide our service to you effectively. In such cases it will be your responsibility to ensure that you have the consent of the people concerned to pass their information on to us. We’ll provide a copy of this privacy notice for them or, where appropriate, ask you to pass the privacy information to them.
Why do we need to collect and use your personal data?
The primary legal basis that we intend to use for the processing of your data is for the performance of our contract with you. The information that we collect about you is essential for us to be able to carry out the services that you require from us effectively. Without collecting your personal data we’d also be unable to fulfil our legal and regulatory obligations.
Where special category data is required we’ll obtain your explicit consent in order to collect and process this information.
We will use consent as the legal basis when we collect data from client surveys, receive feedback or when an enquiry or job application is submitted to us. Consent will be collected in the form of a tick-box on our website or when submission of an application is made via a third party. If we receive an unsolicited CV at a time when we are not recruiting, we will delete the CV and inform the candidate of this.
How will we use the information about you?
We collect information about you in order to provide you with the services for which you engage us, to answer your enquiries or to process a job application.
How we protect your data
We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure, we have put in place appropriate technical, physical and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect about you.
Information which you provide to us will ordinarily be stored in a fully compliant ISO 27001 third party data centre in Norwich.
Who might we share your information with?
If you agree, we may email you about other products or services that we think may be of interest to you.
We won’t share your information for marketing purposes with other companies. In order to deliver our services to you effectively we may send your details to third parties such as those that we engage for professional compliance, accountancy or legal services as well as product and platform providers that we use to arrange financial products for you.
Where third parties are involved in processing your data we’ll have a contract in place with them to ensure that the nature and purpose of the processing is clear, that they are subject to a duty of confidence in processing your data and that they’ll only act in accordance with our written instructions.
Where it’s necessary for your personal data to be forwarded to a third party we’ll use appropriate security measures to protect your personal data in transit. For example, when we pass information to providers of products that we have recommended we would input that information on to their online systems. These systems would require a system login via a password to enable us to do so.
If you contact us to change your personal data and we have previously shared your data with a 3rd party(s), we will endeavour to pass on those changes to the relevant 3rd party(s).
To fulfil our obligations in respect of prevention of money-laundering and other financial crime we may send your details to third party agencies for identity verification purposes.
How long do we keep hold of your information?
During the course of our relationship with you we’ll retain personal data which is necessary to provide services to you. We’ll take all reasonable steps to keep your personal data up to date throughout our relationship.
We’re also subject to regulatory requirements to retain your data for specified minimum periods. These are, generally:
- Five years for investment business
- Three years for mortgage business
- Indefinitely for pension transfers and opt-out business
- Three years for insurance business
These are minimum periods, during which we have a legal obligation to retain your records.
We reserve the right to retain data for longer where we believe it's in our legitimate interests to do so.
Where we collect information on job candidates, we will retain information on unsuccessful candidates for 1 year after the application was made. We will retain successful candidate data for the length of an employee’s contract. We will retain candidate data for the purpose of responding to potential employment tribunal claims arising out of the recruitment process or for potential future vacancies which may be applicable to the candidate.
You have the right to request deletion of your personal data. We’ll comply with this request, subject to the restrictions of our regulatory obligations and legitimate interests as noted above.
How can I access the information you hold about me?
You have the right to request a copy of the information that we hold about you. If you’d like a copy of some or all of your personal information please email or write to us using the contact details noted below.
When your personal data is processed by automated means you have the right to ask us to move your personal data to another organisation for their use.
We have an obligation to ensure that your personal information is accurate and up to date. Please ask us to correct or remove any information that you think is incorrect.
Marketing
We’d like to send you information about our products and services which may be of interest to you. If you’ve agreed to receive marketing information, you may opt out at a later date.
You have a right at any time to stop us from contacting you for marketing purposes. If you no longer wish to be contacted for marketing purposes, please contact us by email or post.
Cookies
We use cookies to track visitor use of the website and to compile statistical reports on website activity.
For further information visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org/
You can set your browser not to accept cookies and the above website tells you how to remove cookies from your browser. However, in a few cases some of our website features may not function as a result.
Other websites
Our website contains links to other websites. This privacy noticepplies to this website so when you link to other websites you should read their own privacy policies.
What can you do if you are unhappy with how your personal data is processed?
You also have a right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority for data protection. In the UK this is:
Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
0303 123 1113 (local rate)
Changes to our privacy notice
We keep our privacy notice under regular review and we’ll place any updates on this web page when they occur. This privacy notice was last updated on 05/10/2021.
How to contact us
Please contact us if you have any questions about our privacy notice information we hold about you: by email at compliance@fs-ifa.com
Or write to us at Compliance Department, Finance Shop, 61 Alexandra Road, Lowestoft, Suffolk NR32 1PL.