Privacy Policy

Here at Debt Correct, we understand that protecting your personal information is of utmost importance. This privacy policy explains how we collect, use and store your personal information and how we ensure it is secure.

This privacy policy applies to you if you provide your personal information to us, even if you decide not to go ahead with any product or service we offer. Within this privacy policy we have set out how we will use your personal data to provide a product or service to you.

If you click on a link that takes you to a third party website that is not ours we will not be responsible for how they use your personal data. You should read its own privacy policy to understand how they may use your personal data.

Date last updated: 14/07/2020

What personal information do we collect?

The information we collect from you depends on the product or service you apply for, or the service that we provide to you. We will only collect information that we actually need, or where we’re required to collect the information to enable us to perform our legal, regulatory or contractual obligations necessary to provide you with the products or services, or where we have your permission.

This will likely include the collection of:

your personal details (e.g. name, date of birth)
address details
contact details (e.g. phone number, email)
special personal information* (e.g. health information)
financial information
employment information
information on how you use our website(s) and products and services

Special personal information*

Data protection law defines some personal information as “special categories of data”. This includes information about physical or mental health, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, race or ethnic origin, political opinions, trade union membership or biometric data. This information may be necessary to collect when understanding the reason for your financial circumstances, or where it may help us to provide a better service to you. For example, a period of ill health could have caused you to fall behind with your regular payments to your creditors.

Where we need to collect and process this type of data about you, by providing this information to us you give your explicit consent for us and any other third party to process this special data as set out in this privacy policy, unless we have a legal obligation to process this type of data.

Any personal information about you relating to criminal convictions or offences may only be used by us when authorised by law.

Information about other people

If you provide personal information about someone else, for example when a joint application is made, you must do so with the permission of the other person. If you enter into a service jointly with another person (for example, a joint Debt Management Plan), your personal information and any information about the service provided to you will be shared with the other person.

We will use the personal information about the other person in the ways as described in this privacy policy.

How we use your personal information

We can only use your personal information where it falls into one or more of the following categories:

it is necessary to enter into or fulfil a contract we have with you;
you have provided your consent;
we have a legal or regulatory obligation to do so;
it is necessary to carry out a task which is in the public interest;
it is necessary to protect your vital interests; or
it is in our legitimate interest to do so and it is not against your rights.

Initial Application/Advice

Where you make an application or enquiry for one of our products or services we’ll use your information to provide you with appropriate information about any solutions we may be able to offer to you. If you cannot provide this information we may not be able to progress with your application or enquiry.

We may also use this information to contact you about and process your application, for example, sending you an email, text message or letter to welcome you to our services.

We will process the personal data we collect about you for the purposes set out below.

After you have made your initial application/enquiry, if you also decide to go ahead with any of the products or services that we offer, the sections below explain how we will also process your data when we provide that particular product(s) or service(s).

Ongoing Services

Where we are providing you with a debt solution, such as a Debt Management Plan, or with any other financial services solution, we will process your personal information to administer the services we provide. This may include contacting you where we may need further information, or sending you updates on the progress of the services we provide to you.

Where we provide ongoing services, we will normally require you to agree to the terms and conditions of the debt solution or service. These will set out how we will provide the services to you and where we will be required, under the terms and conditions, to process your personal information. For example, we would need to your share information with your creditors to enable us to set up and administer a Debt Management Plan.

Please read the section(s) relevant to the specific products and services you receive from us.

Debt Advice

What personal data will we need to collect?

To be able to provide you with Debt Advice we need to collect certain categories of personal data. This will include:

• Contact details – so that we can contact you about and process your enquiry
• The people you owe money to and your property and assets – so we fully understand your financial situation and give you personalised advice that’s tailored to you
• Your Income and expenditure – so that we can accurately work out what you can afford to pay towards your debts and make sure the solution we recommend is the right one for you
• Personal circumstances – such as your employment, living arrangements and financial dependents, so that we can understand and give you advice about how each of the available debt solutions could affect you
• Special personal information – only with your permission and where this is relevant to your financial situation and how a debt solution needs to work for you, or where we have a legal right to do so.

With your permission, we may obtain and use information from your credit file to confirm certain information, including about your lenders, balances, account numbers, your account, address and insolvency history and details of judgments made against you (e.g. CCJs).

Who will the data be shared with?

If you were introduced to our services by a third party, we will share information about what debt solution we have recommended and whether you choose to use our services.

We may share your information with our service partners, i.e. companies who provide services to us that enable us to provide our services to you. This will include IT service providers, communication service providers, printers, professional advisors and insurers, advertisers and social media platforms. We will only share your information with them if they’ve agreed to keep it confidential.

Our regulators , such as the Financial Conduct Authority, the Information Commissioner’s Office or any other regulatory body or authority may request certain information as part of supervising us. We have a legal or regulatory obligation to provide this.

If you have provided your authority, if we have a legitimate interest to do so or where we may be legally entitled to, we will share information with credit reference agencies (CRAs) to obtain information about your financial history or your credit commitments.

For further information on how CRAs may use your personal information you can view the Credit Reference Agency Information Notice here or from the three main CRAs – TransUnion (formerly Callcredit); Equifax; and Experian.

How long will your data be stored for?

If you continue to be our customer and we give you advice, we will keep a record of your personal information to ensure that we provide you with the best service possible and where we’re required to keep your data to meet our legal and regulatory obligations. This will normally be kept for at least 6 years, starting from the date when we are no longer providing you with a service. Telephone calls will be retained for at least 6 years from the date the call was made.

If you do not go ahead with any product or service offered by the Group, your personal information will normally be deleted after 2 years (except for any recorded telephone calls) unless we have another reason to keep your personal information, for example, if you have given your consent to receive marketing or promotional messages from us.

After this time, we will delete the information or anonymise the data so that it cannot be linked back to you.

Debt Management

The table below specifically explains how and why your personal data will be used so that the services can be provided to you.

What personal data will we need to collect?

To be able to provide you with Debt Advice we need to collect certain categories of personal data. This will include:

Contact details – so that we can regularly contact you where we need to and update you about your DMP
Your Income and expenditure – so that we can accurately work out what you can afford to pay towards your DMP
The people you owe money to – so we can properly administer your DMP
Personal circumstances – such as your employment, living arrangements, property, assets and financial dependents, to carry out your regular reviews and advise how any change in your situation affects your DMP and whether your DMP is still the right solution for you
Special personal information – only with your permission and where this is relevant to your financial situation and the administration of your DMP, or where we have a legal right to do so
Financial details – we need this information to be able to collect your regular payments for your DMP.

This is required to enable you to enter into a DMP and to fulfil our contractual obligations with you, and to fulfil our legal and regulatory obligations.

Who will the data be shared with?

Your personal information will be shared with creditors and debt collectors who you owe money to so that we can arrange a payment arrangement under your DMP. This is a key part of the services we’ve contractually agreed to provide to you.

Your personal data may be shared with tracing agents where we have a legitimate interest to obtain up to date contact information to help us to continue to provide the services to you.

If you have provided your authority or we have a legitimate interest to do so, or where we may be legally entitled to, we will share information with credit reference agencies (CRAs) to obtain information about your financial history or your credit commitments.

For further information on how CRAs may use your personal information you can view the Credit Reference Agency Information Notice here or from the three main CRAs – TransUnion; Equifax; and Experian.

How long will your data be stored for?

Whilst you continue to be our customer, we will keep a record of your personal data to ensure that we provide you with the best service possible and where we’re required to keep your personal information to meet our legal and regulatory obligations. This will normally be kept for at least 6 years, starting from the date when we are no longer providing you with a service. We will retain telephone calls for at least 6 years from the date the call was made.

After this time, we will delete the information or anonymise the data so that it cannot be linked back to you.

Other Purposes for processing your Personal Data

Websites and marketing

To help us understand you better and provide you with information about other products which may be suitable and relevant, we will use your personal information to create a profile of you and your circumstances. This allows us to provide more relevant, accurate and tailored services to you. For example, we may assess your income and expenditure to determine whether you would be eligible for a debt solution through us. We believe we have a legitimate interest to do this and that it is not against your rights.

However, if you don’t want us to profile your personal information this way, to then better enable us to tailor any marketing communications to you, you can contact us to let us know that you wish for your personal data not to be used in this way.

Reviews and Market Research

Where we have a copy of your personal information we may contact you to ask you to provide a review about the services you’ve received or where we are carrying out market research which may help us design future products and services or to help improve our current services. Although this information would really help us, you wouldn’t be required to provide us with this information unless you were happy to. We consider that this is in our legitimate interests to contact you in this way for market research purposes.

Legal or Regulatory Obligation

We are required to process your personal information where we have a legal or regulatory obligation to do so, for example, to adhere to anti-money laundering or our regulatory obligations.

Responding to complaints or enquiries

If you make an enquiry or complaint with us, we will use your personal information to investigate the complaint and deal with your enquiry. We have a legal and regulatory obligation to deal with your complaint appropriately.

Internal Analysis

As part of our legitimate interest to develop our business and our products we will use your personal information to assess our performance as a business and for statistical analysis. We will use your personal information to assess our performance as a business and for statistical analysis. We will use as little personal data as we can to achieve this. We may also share this analysis with third parties who provide us with services and where we have a contractual obligation to do so.

Who do we share your information with?

In addition to the companies, organisations and other third parties set out above, we may also share your personal information with the following organisations:

IT Service Providers who provide IT platforms or other IT services
Payment Service companies that process transactions for us (e.g. Direct Debits and card transactions)
Communication providers (e.g. telephone line providers, and email and text service providers)
Printers who print the letters and information packs which we send to you
Advertisers and social media companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter for our social media accounts or where we can contact you using your social media account
Third parties who may have introduced you to our services

These companies help us to provide our services to you. We will have a contract in place with any provider who directly provides us with such direct services to ensure that they comply with their data protection obligations and ensure that they have appropriate security measures in place.

We may also share your personal information where we have your consent to do so or where we’re required to do so under a legal or regulatory obligation or court order, such as the police, local authorities or the courts.

The personal information we have collected from you may be shared with law enforcement agencies and fraud prevention agencies who will use it to prevent fraud, money-laundering and terrorist financing and to verify your identity. If fraud is detected, you could be refused certain services, finance or employment. Further details of how your information is used by us and these fraud prevention agencies, and your data protection rights, can be found by contacting us.

Other Information

Social Media

We use publicly available social media platforms to promote our services, to provide updates and to share any news and promotional updates. We may collect personal information from these social media platforms, for example, if you post a message on our Facebook page. By providing any of your information to us through these platforms you should be aware that:

the social media web pages are publicly available and you must not provide any personal or sensitive information on our pages that are accessible to the public, such as your account information. We may ask you for your account information via a private message to identify you and to service any request you make; and
each social media platform will process any personal information you provide through the platform and will be processed in accordance with its own privacy policy. The privacy policies are available to view on each social media platform.

Sharing your information outside of the EEA

We will only share your personal information outside the European Economic Area (EEA), where we have your consent; to comply with a legal obligation; or where we work with a business partner to enable us to provide you with our services, and they process information outside of the EEA.

If we do share your information outside of the EEA we will make sure that it is protected in the same way as if it was being used in the EEA to ensure appropriate safeguards are in place. This may include putting in place a contract with the business partner that means they must protect the personal data to the same standards as the EEA (this may include defined model clauses), or only share the data to a business partner in a non-EEA country where the privacy laws provide the same protection as within the EEA or where they are part of a Privacy Shield.

More information on this can be found on the European Commission Justice Website.

Security

We take the protection of personal information very seriously and we will maintain appropriate measures to maintain the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the information you have provided. Such measures include:

Company security policies and standards
staff security awareness
role based access controls to prevent unauthorised access to the information
encryption and anonymisation technology
anti-malware technologies
security monitoring
security testing
secure archiving and deletion
compliance with industry regulation and legislation

How we may contact you about our products and services

To help us keep you up to date about the products and services that we provide to you, and to ensure that you’re kept fully informed, we may contact you by letter, telephone, email, text message, push notifications, social media or may send you messages by any online customer platforms or other electronic means.

If you start an application for a product or service through us we will attempt to contact you shortly after if you were unable to complete your application for whatever reason.

If you do not want to be contacted in a particular way then you can request this at any time, but if we are providing a service to you, we do need to be able to send you communications. This can often be due to a legal or regulatory requirement.

It is important that you keep us up to date when you change your contact details to ensure that we use your up to date contact information.

Recording calls & Contact

We record any telephone calls you make to us or we make to you or any other third party. This is for training, monitoring and quality purposes and to meet our legal and regulatory obligations. Some telephone calls may be observed by staff for training and development purposes.

We may keep a copy of the telephone calls for up to 6 years from the date the telephone call was made.

Contact

If you have any questions or queries about how we use your personal information you can contact us or our Data Protection Officer using the address or email below:

Data Protection Officer
Debt Correct,
Ram Mill, Gordon Street,
Chadderton,
Oldham,
OL9 9RH

Email: contactus@debtcorrect.hubsolv.com

If you are not happy with how we process your personal information you should contact us in the first instance. If you’re not happy with how we have dealt with your complaint you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office. You can find their details on their website at https://ico.org.uk/

Your Rights

Access to your personal information

You have the right to request from us a copy of the personal information that we may hold about you. This is often called a “Data Subject Access Request”. You can request this information by contacting us as set out below.

Before providing this information to you or to another person or company where you have requested this personal information to be sent to, we may ask for proof of identity or ask sufficient questions to enable us to locate the information and ensure that we’re only providing it were you have given your agreement.

Right to have your personal information corrected

If the personal information we hold about you is incorrect you have the right to request that we correct this.

Right to stop or limit the processing of the data we carry out

You may request that your personal information is deleted or that we stop processing the information if we’re no longer entitled to process it. There may be occasions where we are unable to delete the data due to our legal or regulatory obligations. We will however discuss this with you if you request for your information to be deleted.

Portability

In some cases you may be able to request for your information to be provided to you or to another company in a format that can be processed electronically by you or the other company. If you want to request this you’ll need to contact us.

Updates to this privacy policy

Any updates to this privacy policy will be found on this page. If we make any important or significant changes to the way we may collect and use your personal information we will endeavour to notify you of this change.