A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer's hard drive.
Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.
We use the following cookies:
- Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to log into secure areas of our website, use a shopping cart or make use of e-billing services.
- Analytical or performance cookies. These allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
- Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region).
- Marketing and Targeting cookies. These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.
You can block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our website.
Please note that some third parties also use cookies, over which we have no control. These third parties may include, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services. These third-party cookies are likely to be analytical cookies or performance cookies or targeting cookies. Examples of these companies are Facebook and Google.
You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them by contacting our Data Protection Lead at the contact address listed in our Privacy Policy document.
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.
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.
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:
- Three years for mortgage 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. In any case, we’ll not keep your personal data for longer than 3 years after our relationship with you has ended.
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.
This privacy policy was last updated on 1st April 2023