Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy (“Privacy Policy”) sets out the basis on which Proplend Limited (Proplend) and Proplend Security Limited (PSL) will process any data that may be used to identify you (“personal data”) collected by either or both of them from you, or that you provide to either of them.

Capitalised terms not otherwise defined in this Privacy Policy shall have the meaning given to them in the Proplend Members’ Agreement (the “Members’ Agreement”) of which this Privacy Policy forms part.

You represent and warrant that:

  • you have read and understood this Privacy Policy;
  • all the personal data you provide to Proplend and/or PSL is complete, true and accurate to the best of your knowledge and belief;
  • other than to comply with our lawful instructions, you will not share with, publish or disclose to anyone any information, any Lender or Borrower and/or the business, products, services, affairs, clients or finances of Proplend or PSL (or any of their affiliates and partners) and will keep such information secure and strictly confidential at all times;
  • you will not share, for whatever reason, your log-in details to access your Proplend Account and will keep them secure and strictly confidential at all times.
  • Our Data Protection Officer is Brian Bartaby and he can be contacted at:
    The Data Protection Officer
    Proplend Limited
    15 Little Green
    Richmond
    TW9 1QH

If you have any questions regarding this Privacy Policy, please email us at [email protected].

 

2. The information Proplend collects


Proplend adheres to UK Data Protection Legislation which, from 25th May 2018, includes EU Regulation 2016/679 General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”). All data is processed and controlled from a legal basis in accordance with GDPR Art 6(1), namely “legitimate interest”.

Proplend operates the Service and only collects personal information relevant to the making of Offers and Loan Requests via the Service and the administration and enforcement of Loan Contracts. PSL only collects personal information relevant to the entry by the Borrower into Security Documents; the administration and enforcement of the Security Documents; and the enforcement of Loan Contracts assigned to it. Such information is given directly by you and by people or companies authorised by you to act on your behalf, and it may also include information obtained from those third parties authorised by you to share such information with Proplend and/or PSL.

Proplend and PSL may collect and process the following information about you:

  • Information that you provide by filling in forms on the Service Website. This includes information provided at the time of registering to use the Service, posting material or requesting further services. We may also ask you for information when you report a problem with the Service;
    Information about your financial interests, financial position, or loan repayment performance;
  • Your contact details, including your e-mail address, home address and telephone numbers and (where applicable) the contact details of your first of kin;
  • Proplend may make and retain copies of passports or other identification evidence that you provide for anti-money laundering and anti-fraud purposes;
  • Records of any correspondence between you and each of Proplend and PSL;
  • Records of any surveys that you may be asked to complete for research purposes, although you do not have to respond to them;
  • Details of transactions you carry out through the Service and the receipt and disbursement of Repayments;
  • Details of your visits to the Service Website and the resources that you access;
  • Information about your physical or mental health or condition (where necessary and appropriate);
  • Information relating to any criminal proceedings in which you have been involved;
  • Credit checks to assess the creditworthiness of any Borrower or the counterparty to any Security Document.

We may monitor, record, store and use any telephone, email or other communication with you for the purposes described below.

3. Where we store your personal data and how long it is stored for

The data described in Section 2 of this Privacy Policy is stored in the United Kingdom (“UK”), but it may also be transferred to, and stored at, a destination other than the UK and/or outside the European Economic Area (“EEA”), where it may be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers or partners. Such staff may be engaged in, among other things, the processing of your payment details and the provision of support services (such as data processing). By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password that enables you to access certain parts of our site, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Once we have received your information, we will use procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access. We use sophisticated website encryption technology to protect sensitive date that you submit to us online. We use this technology to reduce the risk of your data being intercepted by unauthorised persons during transmission. However, the transmission of information via the Internet is not completely secure and, while we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our Service Website and any transmission is at your own risk.


We retain your information for as long as we continue to have a relationship with you. For a Lender, this means as long as you continue to have an account with Proplend Limited.

Once our relationship with you has ended, we will retain information that allows us to:

  • Comply with record-keeping requirements under law or regulation (for example, as required under the Money Laundering Regulations).
  • Deal appropriately with any complaints regarding the services we have provided.
  • Defend (or potentially bring) any existing or future legal claims.
  • Maintain records of anyone who does not want to receive marketing from us to prevent us from inadvertently ignoring your wishes in the future.

The period over which we may lawfully retain information is often linked to the record- keeping requirement (for example, five years from the end of the relationship in the case of checks made to comply with the Money Laundering Regulations) or to the amount of time available to bring a legal claim (typically six years for claims in relation to a contract).

We would retain your information after this time only if we are required to do so to comply with law or regulation, or if there are complaints or claims outstanding which reasonably require your information to be retained for longer. If we do retain your information for lawful reasons, we will continue to ensure that your privacy is protected.

4. Use of personal information

Each of Proplend and PSL acts as data controller when processing and storing your personal data.

Each of Proplend and PSL may use information held about you in one or more of the following ways:

  • To ensure that content on the Service Website is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your computer;
  • To provide you with information, products or services that you request or which Proplend decides may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes;
  • For statistical analysis;
  • To develop and improve the Service;
  • To update their records;
  • To identify which Loan Requests or elements of the Service or other products might interest you;
  • To assess lending and insurance risks, including creditworthiness and affordability;
  • To identify, prevent, detect or tackle fraud, money laundering and other crime;
  • To carry out checks required by applicable regulation or regulatory guidance;
  • To keep you informed about your Loan Contracts or Security Documents, as the case may be;
  • To carry out our obligations arising from and exercise our rights under, any agreements between you and either of us or other users of the Service, including tracing and recovering debts;
  • To allow you to participate in interactive features of the Service, when you choose to do so;
  • To give you any notices under the Members Agreement, Loan Contract(s) or Security Document(s).

You acknowledge that credit reference agencies link together the records of you and anyone that you have advised is a financial associate (e.g. someone with whom you have a joint credit account) including previous and subsequent names of parties to the account. Links between financial associates will remain on your, and their, credit reference files until such time as you or your partner successfully files for a disassociation with the credit reference agencies. When assessing the affordability of your repayments, Proplend and PSL may take into account information about your financial associates in your credit reference.

We may use our record of any telephone, email or other communication with you for the purposes described above and in order to check any instructions given to us, for training purposes, for crime prevention and to improve the quality of our customer service.

5. Disclosure of your information

Each of Proplend and PSL may disclose your personal information to any member of our group, which means our subsidiaries and our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries, based in the UK, in any part of the EEA or elsewhere.

Each of Proplend and PSL will keep your personal data confidential and only disclose it to others for the purposes explained when you applied, and:

  • In the event that it sells or buy any business or assets, in which case it may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets;
  • If substantially all of its assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by it about their customers will be one of the transferred assets;
  • If it is under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation, or in order to enforce or apply any agreements to which you are a party; or to protect the rights, property, or safety of it, its customers, or others (which includes exchanging information with other companies and organisations for the purposes of fraud protection and credit risk reduction);
  • If you request it, or give your permission for it to do so;
  • To a credit reference agency to check your identity and to prevent fraud, (it will also keep a record of your request and use it whenever anyone applies to be authenticated in your name);
  • To tell credit reference agencies that you have an account and how you run that account on an ongoing basis;
  • To agents and subcontractors, acting for either it or a Lender, to use for the purpose of operating the Service and obtaining the payment of any amount owed by you or a related Borrower;
  • To investigate, prevent or detect fraud or carry out checks against money laundering;
  • To organisations providing a centralised application matching service which they collect from and about mortgage and/or credit applications, for the purpose of preventing and detecting fraud;
  • To a credit broker in the event that you apply to borrow money, your application is declined or the loan monies are otherwise unavailable and it reasonably believes that the credit broker may be able to help you obtain a loan;
  • To debt collectors and other third parties to trace you and recover any debt;
  • For audit purposes and to meet obligations to any relevant regulatory authority or taxing authority.


Proplend will also check your details with a fraud prevention agency/agencies and credit reference agencies and if you give false or inaccurate information and Proplend identifies fraud, this will be recorded and may be shared by those agencies with other organisations and Proplend, so that Proplend and those other organisations, including law enforcement agencies and debt collection agencies, may access, use and search these records to:

  • help make decisions about credit and credit related services, for you and members of your household;
  • help make decisions on motor, household, credit, life and other insurance proposals and insurance claims, for you and members of your household;
  • trace debtors, recover debt, prevent fraud, and to manage your accounts or insurance policies;
  • prevent fraud and money laundering, for example, when:
    Checking details on applications for credit and credit related or other facilities;
  • Managing credit and credit related accounts or facilities;
  • Checking details on proposals and claims for all types of insurance; and
  • Checking details of job applicants and employees.

Please contact us at [email protected] if you want to receive details of the relevant fraud prevention agencies.

More information about credit reference agencies, their role as fraud prevention agencies, the data they hold, for how long, your rights and how they use personal information is available at the following links to each agency’s Credit Reference Agency Information Notice:

Call Credit:

  • callcredit.co.uk/crain

Equifax

  • equifax.co.uk/crain

Experian:

  • experian.co.uk/crain

Any credit reference agency Proplend searches will keep a record of any search, and other lenders may use it to assess applications they receive from you in the future. As a general rule, Proplend will give you at least 28 days’ notice if any decision to file notice of any default by you in your obligation to make repayments on your credit reference file. However, Proplend may not always give you notice beforehand, for example, if enforcement action is planned.

6. Your rights

You have the right to ask either Proplend and/or PSL not to process your personal data for marketing purposes. Each of Proplend and PSL will usually inform you (before collecting your data) if it intends to use your data for such purposes or if it intends to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. You can exercise your right to prevent such processing by checking certain boxes on the forms used to collect your data. You can also exercise the right at any time by contacting Proplend at [email protected].

The Service Website may, from time to time, contain links to and from the websites of partner networks, advertisers and affiliates. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that these websites have their own privacy policies and that neither Proplend nor PSL accepts any responsibility or liability for these policies. Please check these policies before you submit any personal data to these websites.

Under the Data Protection Act 1998, you have a right to access certain personal records that Proplend and/or PSL holds about you. Your right of access can be exercised in writing in accordance with the Act. Any access request may be subject to a fee to meet Proplend’s and/or PSL’s costs (as the case may be) in providing you with details of the information they hold about you.

Proplend and PSL aims to keep your personal information up-to-date, so please advise them of any changes by e-mailing [email protected] or by updating your Proplend Account. You must notify Proplend by emailing [email protected] within thirty days if any of any change in your name, residential address, telephone number, e-mail address, or referees’ address, and any other details that it reasonably considers to be material to its dealings with you in relation to the Service.

 

  • You have the right to have inaccurate personal data rectified or completed if it is incomplete. You can make a request for rectification verbally, in writing or by e-mail.
  • You have the right to have your personal data erased – also known as ‘the right to be forgotten’. Please note, however, that this right is not absolute and there are circumstances in which the right does not apply and erasure is not possible (for example, we cannot erase your data if you still have a relationship with us or if we have a lawful reason to retain your data).
  • You have the right to request the restriction or suppression of your personal data. Please note however that this is not an absolute right and only applies in certain circumstances (for example, you may ask us to restrict the use of certain data if you believe that it is inaccurate, and we are considering your request for rectification). You can make a request to restrict processing verbally, in writing or by e-mail.
  • You have the right to receive the personal data that you have provided to us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. You can also request that we transmit this data directly to another Data Controller provided this is technically feasible given our systems and theirs. You can make a request for a portable copy of your data verbally, in writing or by e-mail.
  • You have the right to object to the processing of your personal data in certain circumstances. You can make an objection verbally, in writing or by e-mail.

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 may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances. Please contact our team at [email protected]. When you make a request to us, we normally have one month in which to respond. Please note that this can be extended by a further two months if the request is complex or if we have received a number of requests from you.

7. Release, Indemnity and Liability

To the extent permitted under applicable law, you hereby release Proplend, PSL, their affiliates and partners, and hold Proplend, PSL and their affiliates and partners harmless from and against all actions, liabilities, claims, demands, damages, costs and expenses arising out of or in connection with any communication, notification, disclosure, sharing of information (including your personal data) that Proplend, PSL and any of its affiliates or partners may make in accordance with the provisions of this Privacy Policy.

To the extent permitted under applicable law, you shall indemnify Proplend, PSL, its partners and its affiliates, and hold Proplend, PSL its partners and its affiliates harmless from and against all actions, liabilities, claims, demands, damages, costs and expenses arising from or in connection with any breach by you of this Privacy Policy.

While each of Proplend and PSL has used and shall use its reasonable endeavours to ensure that all your personal data that it holds shall be kept confidential as required by the Data Protection Act 1998, neither Proplend nor PSL shall be liable for any loss or damage incurred by you in the event that third parties wrongly gain access to your personal data, other than through Proplend’s or PSL’s own negligence, breach of contract or wilful misconduct.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, each of Proplend’s and PSL’s liability (and the liability of any of their affiliates and partners) arising from or in connection with this Privacy Policy shall be limited to the amount of any fees you pay to Proplend or PSL (as the case may be).

To the extent permitted by applicable law, neither Proplend nor PSL shall be liable for any indirect, special or consequential loss or damage, including loss of income or revenue, loss of business, loss of contract, loss of anticipated savings, loss of goodwill, loss of opportunity, or loss of data.

8. Cookies

This section sets out our cookie policy (“Cookie Policy”). Capitalised terms not otherwise defined in this Cookie Policy have the meaning given to them in the Privacy Policy.

What are cookies? Cookies are data files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to the device or browser you use when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website which recognises that cookie.

Please note that we can also collect information about Service usage from data contained in “log files” from third parties. Log files are not cookies; they do not contain any personal data; and they are not used to identify your personal use of the Service. When you request any web page from the Service, web servers automatically obtain your domain name and IP address, but they reveal nothing personal about you and that data is only used to examine Service traffic in aggregate, to investigate abuse of the Service and its users, and/or to cooperate with law enforcement. Such data is not disseminated to third parties, except in aggregate.

How do we use cookies? We use cookies in order to ensure our Service functions correctly and to improve our understanding of how you use the Service in order to make improvements. Cookies cannot harm your computer.

What cookies do we use? Firstly, we explain what each type is and then, in the table below, we have stated which types we actually use.

In general, there are four different types of cookie.

Necessary cookies: those required for the operation of the Service, which do not gather information about you that could be used for marketing or remembering where you have been on the internet.

Analytical/performance cookies: these allow us to collect information about how you use the Service, such as, how you move around our website and if you experience any errors. These cookies do not collect personal data. The information collected is anonymous and is only used to help us improve the way the Service works, understand what interests our users generally and measure how effective our advertising is. Some of the performance cookies we use are issued as part of services provided by third parties, like Google Analytics.

Functionality cookies: these are used to provide services or to recognise you when you return to our website. These would enable us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences and improve your visit.

Targeting cookies: these record your visit to the Service, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. They are linked to services provided by third parties, such as “Like” and “Share” buttons. The third party provides these services in return for recognising that you have visited our website. The third party may subsequently use information about your visit to target advertising to you on other websites and present you with advertisements that you may be interested in.

How do I manage my cookie settings? Please note that configuring your computer and/or mobile browser to reject ‘necessary’, ‘performance’ or ‘functional’ cookies may severely impact your experience on our website and some parts of the Service will not function at all.

All browsers provide tools that allow you to control how you handle cookies: accept, reject or delete them. These settings are normally accessed via the ‘settings’, ‘preferences’ or ‘options’ menu of the browser you are using, but you could also look for a ‘help’ function or contact the browser provider. If you are unsure as to how to manage your cookies, please see the following links to view instructions for the most commonly used web browsers:

Firefox internet settings

Chrome cookie settings

Opera cookie settings

Safari cookie settings

Internet Explorer cookie settings

You may also use tools provided by the third parties mentioned in the table above to prevent their Targeting cookies being set.

9. General

This Privacy Policy shall be governed by and construed in accordance with English law and the parties agree that the courts of England shall have exclusive jurisdiction to decide any dispute arising under it.

We hope that we can resolve any query or concern that you raise about our use of your information. However, if we are unable to resolve your concern or complaint, you have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”) which is the data protection authority of the United Kingdom. The ICO’s web site can be found at: https://ico.org.uk.