Privacy Notice

Purpose of this privacy notice

This privacy notice aims to give you information on how Optimum SME Finance Limited collects and processes your personal data, including any data you may provide through this website or, if you are a client, by requesting our services, or, if you are a debtor, when we take an assignment of your debt from a client.

Our service is not intended for children and we do not knowingly collect data relating to children.

Controller

Optimum SME Finance Limited is the data controller for the personal data we collect and process about you.

We have appointed a data protection officer (DPO) who is responsible for overseeing questions in relation to this privacy notice. If you have any questions about this privacy notice, including any requests to exercise your legal rights please contact the DPO using the details set out below.

Contact details

Our full details are:

Full name of legal entity: Optimum SME Finance Limited. We are registered in England and Wales under number 10508987 and we have our registered office and main trading office at Cube M4 Business Park, Old Gloucester Road, Bristol BS16 1FX.

DPO Email address: dpo@optimumfinance.co.uk

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.

Changes to the privacy notice and your duty to inform us of changes

We keep our privacy policy under regular review. When we make significant changes we may at our discretion inform you via email.

It is important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. We may ask you to confirm updates to your personal data from time to time but please keep us informed if your personal data changes during your relationship with us in the meantime. Please inform the DPO of any changes in your data at the following email address: personaldata@optimumfinance.co.uk.

THIRD-PARTY LINKS AND SOCIAL MEDIA

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 have a social media presence for the purpose of promoting our services and interacting with our clients.

If you enable such connections or choose to communicate your personal data to us via third-party websites or social media, please remember that we do not control these third-party websites. When you leave our website or interact with us on social media, your personal data may be collected and processed by those third parties and further detail on this can be found in their privacy notices.

THE DATA WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU

Personal data, or personal information, 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).

Depending on your relationship with us, we may collect and process the following categories of personal data:

• Identity Data (e.g. first name, maiden name, last name, username or similar identifier, marital status, title, date of birth and gender)
• Contact Data (e.g. billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone numbers)
• Financial Data (e.g. billing address, delivery address, email address and telephone numbers)
• Transaction Data (e.g. details about payments to and from you and other details of products and services you have purchased from us)
• Technical Data(e.g. 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)
• Conversation Data(e.g. monitoring and/or recording of telephone conversations with you for training and/or security purposes)
• Profile Data (e.g. monitoring and/or recording of telephone conversations with you for training and/or security purposes)
• Usage Data (e.g.information about how you use our website, products and services)
• Marketing and Communications Data (e.g.information about how you use our website, products and services)

We refer to the above categories of data in the data subject category tables which can be found here.

We also collect, use and share Aggregated Data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose. Aggregated Data may be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law as this data does 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 processed in accordance with this privacy notice.

We do not collect any Special Categories of Personal Data about you (these are set out in the legislation and include details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health and genetic and biometric data). We may collect information about criminal convictions and offences. Further legal controls apply to data relating to criminal convictions and allegations of criminal activity. We will only collect such information with your explicit consent. All such information is collected in accordance with this privacy notice. We have in place appropriate policy documents, a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) and Record of Processing Activities (ROPA), as required by law to ensure appropriate safeguards are applied when processing such 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 provide you with services). In this case, we may have to cancel a service you have with us but we will notify you if this is the case at the time.

PROCESSING APPLICATIONS

In order to process your application, we will supply certain of your personal information to credit reference agencies (CRAs) and they will give us information about your financial history. We do this to assess creditworthiness and product suitability, check your identity, manage your account, trace and recover debts and prevent criminal activity. We will also continue to exchange information about you with CRAs on an ongoing basis, including about your settled accounts and any debts not fully repaid on time. CRAs will share your information with other organisations. The identities of the CRAs, and the ways in which they use and share personal information, are explained in more detail at http://www.experian.co.uk/crain/index.html.

HOW IS YOUR PERSONAL DATA COLLECTED?

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

• • Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact and Financial Data by filling in forms or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise. This includes personal data you provide when you:
    • apply for our services;
    • create and discuss an account with us;
    • subscribe to our service or publications;
    • request marketing to be sent to you;
    • enter a survey;
    • give us some feedback.
  • Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies and other similar technologies. We may also receive Technical Data about you if you visit other websites employing our cookies. Please see our cookie policy for further details.
  • Third parties or publicly available sources. We may receive personal data about you from various third parties and public sources as set out below:
    • Technical Data from the following parties:
      • analytics providers such as Google;
    • Contact, Financial and Transaction Data from providers of technical, payment and delivery services such as Creditsafe.
    • Identity and Contact Data from data brokers or aggregators such as Creditsafe.
    • Identity and Contact Data from publicly available sources such as Companies House and the Electoral Register.
    • Identity and Contact Data from referrers and intermediaries.

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:

• To provide our products and services to you.
• To manage our relationship with you.
• Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation.
• To improve our website and services.
• We may also use your personal information, typically in an emergency, where this is necessary to protect your vital interests or someone else’s vital interests.

Under Article 6 of the UK GDPR, we can only use your personal data where we have a lawful basis to do so, eg:

• where you have given consent
• to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations
• for the performance of a contract with you or to take steps at your request before entering into a contract, or
• for our legitimate interests or those of a third party

A legitimate interest is when we have a business or commercial reason to use your personal data, so long as this is not overridden by your own rights and interests. We will carry out an assessment when relying on legitimate interests, to balance our interests against yours.

The types of lawful basis that we will rely on to process your personal data are set out in the table below.

Generally, we do not rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data other than in relation to sending third-party direct marketing communications to you via email or text message. You have the right to withdraw consent to marketing at any time by emailing unsubscribe@optimumfinance.co.uk

Purposes for which we will use your personal data

We have set out below, in a table format, a description of all the ways we plan to use your personal data, and which of the legal bases we rely on to do so. We have also identified what our legitimate interests are where appropriate. Please click on the category relevant to you for more information:

• Clients
• Debtors

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 the DPO at dpo@optimumfinance.co.uk 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.If you are a client of Optimum SME Finance Limited this section will be relevant to you:

If you are a debtor of Optimum SME Finance Limited (by which we mean where we are acting for a client to manage the recovery of a debt due from you to a client of ours where your debt to our client has been assigned to us by means of a debt purchase agreement) this section will be relevant to you:

Marketing

We strive to provide you with choices regarding certain personal data uses, particularly around marketing and advertising. You can manage your marketing preferences or opt out of marketing at any time by following the opt-out links on any marketing message sent to you or by contacting us at any time.

Promotional offers from us

We may use your Identity, Contact, Technical, Usage and Profile 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.

You will receive marketing communications from us if you have requested information from us and, in each case, you have not opted out of receiving that marketing.

Third-party marketing

We will get your express opt-in consent before we share your personal data with any company outside of SME Optimum Finance Limited for marketing purposes.

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.

Cookies

You can change your cookie preferences on the Optimum Finance website by clicking the cog icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.

You can also set your browser to refuse all or some browser cookies or to alert you when websites set or access cookies. If you disable or refuse cookies, please note that some parts of this website may become inaccessible or not function properly. For more information about the cookies we use, please see Cookie Policy.

Change of purpose

We will only use your personal data for the purposes for which we collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If you wish to get an explanation as to how the processing for the new purpose is compatible with the original purpose, please contact the DPO at dpo@optimumfinance.co.uk.

If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent where this is required or permitted by law. This may include, but is not limited to, sharing a contract between you (as a client) and one of your customers as shared with Optimum SME Finance Limited to third party AI platforms, provided that any personal data is kept and controlled within the terms of any such third party's data protection policies. Such third party AI platforms may include, ChatGPT whose Privacy Policy can be found at EU privacy policy | OpenAI, and Chat PDF, whose Privacy Policy can be found at: ChatPDF - Privacy Policy (notion.site).

Should you have any queries about how Chat PDF or any other third party AI platform may handle and process your data, please contact the DPO at dpo@optimumfinance.co.uk.

SHARING YOUR PERSONAL DATA

We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in the table above:

• Members of our corporate group, which means our holding company and its subsidiaries.
• Service providers acting as processors who provide IT and storage services. Where any of these organisations is based, or have group or affiliated companies that are based, outside of the UK then the paragraph headed International Transfers sets out the basis on which your personal data is transferred to them:
  • Microsoft Azure based inside the EEA,
  • Zoho (based outside the UK);
  • Rackspace based inside the EEA; and
  • Dancerace based inside the EEA.
• Professional advisers acting as processors or joint controllers including lawyers, bankers, auditors and insurers based in the UK who provide consultancy, banking, legal, insurance and accounting services.
• Credit reference agencies
• HM Revenue & Customs, regulators and other authorities acting as processors or joint controllers based in the UK.
• Legal or regulatory authorities, when required to do so by law.
• Credit reference agencies, as explained in “PROCESSING APPLICATIONS” section above

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.

INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS

 (a) Corporate Group

We share your personal data with members of our corporate group, which means our holding company and its subsidiaries. This may be for business administration purposes, in which case each party will be a data controller, or where another group company is helping us to deliver the services and is acting on our instruction as a data processor.

In some instances this will involve transferring your data outside the UK to Canada and the USA.

Whenever we transfer your personal data outside the UK to members of our corporate group in connection with the above purposes we ensure that appropriate contractual safeguards are in place to protect your information. We do this via specific standard contractual terms approved for use in the UK which give the transferred personal data the same protection as it has in the UK, namely the UK Addendum to the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses for international data transfers. To obtain a copy of these contractual safeguards, please contact us at dpo@optimumfinance.co.uk.

 (b) Service Providers

We may transfer your personal data to service providers that carry out certain functions on our behalf. This may involve transferring data outside the UK to countries whose laws do not provide the same level of data protection as those in the UK.

Whenever we transfer your personal data out of the UK to service providers, we rely on one or more of the following mechanisms to ensure a similar degree of protection is afforded to it:

• Adequacy regulations, where applicable, via which certain countries are deemed by the UK to provide an adequate level of protection for personal data (for example, the EEA and Canada); and/or
• The following contractual terms which give the transferred personal data the same protection as it has in the UK, namely:
  • Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs), approved by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO); or
  • UK Addendum to the EU SCCs

If you would like further information on these safeguards, please contact the DPO at dpo@optimumfinance.co.uk.

DATA SECURITY

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. 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.

DATA RETENTION

How long will you use my personal data for?

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

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 requirements.

By law, we have to keep basic information about our customers (including Contact, Identity, Financial and Transaction Data) for six years after they cease being customers for tax purposes.

In some circumstances you can ask us to delete your data: see Request erasure below for further information.

In some circumstances, we may anonymise 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.

YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS

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

You have the right to:

• 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 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 override 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: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful, but you do not want us to erase it; (c) 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; or (d) 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 email personaldata@optimumfinance.co.uk

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 may refuse to comply with your request in these circumstances.

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.

Time limit to respond

We try to respond to all legitimate requests within one month. Occasionally it may 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.