Privacy Notice

Buzz Financial Limited is the data controller for the personal information described in this notice. That means we decide how and why your information is used, and we are responsible for looking after it.

What we collect depends on what you have asked us to do. If you only ever send us a text message and never come back, we hold very little. If we arrange a mortgage for you, we hold a great deal more, because lenders and regulators require it.

Recorded calls

Calls to and from our main office number are recorded. We do this to keep an accurate record of the advice given and the information you provided, to resolve any dispute about what was agreed, to train our team, and because our regulator expects us to be able to evidence our advice. Recordings are treated in the same way as the rest of your file and are covered by the retention periods in section 8. You can ask for a copy of a recording of your own call using the contact details in section 1.

CCTV at our office

Our office is fitted with CCTV. It operates for the security of our premises, our team and visitors. Footage is not used for any other purpose, is held only for as long as needed for that purpose, and is shared outside the firm only with the police or an insurer where there is a genuine incident. You can request footage of yourself using the contact details in section 1.

Information about other people

If you give us information about someone else — a joint applicant, a partner, a dependant or a beneficiary — you confirm you have their permission to do so, and that you have shown them this notice or told them where to find it.

Children

We do not knowingly collect information directly from anyone under 18, other than the names and dates of birth of dependants where that is relevant to advice we are giving to their parent or guardian.

• Directly from you — when you text us, call, email, complete a form on one of our websites, or talk to us in a meeting.
• From our advertising — for example, if you text the number on our Bristol Pitbulls banner, we receive your mobile number and the message you sent.
• From someone who referred you — an estate agent, solicitor, accountant, introducer or an existing client, where they have your permission to pass on your details.
• From credit reference agencies, where we or a lender carry out a credit search.
• From lenders, insurers and product providers during an application.
• Automatically, from cookies and similar technologies when you use our websites.

Data protection law requires us to have a valid reason — a "lawful basis" — for each use of your information. Ours are set out below.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interest is outweighed by your rights and freedoms, and concluded that it is not. You can ask us for more detail on that assessment at any time, and you have the right to object — see section 9.

Special category information

Health and similar information is treated as "special category" data and given extra protection. We rely on your explicit consent to process it for protection and later-life advice, and on the ground of establishing, exercising or defending legal claims where a complaint or claim arises. You can withdraw that consent at any time, though we may then be unable to continue advising you on that product.

Replying to you is not marketing. If you text our advertised number, you have asked us to get in touch, and the reply you receive is a response to your own enquiry.

Beyond that, we only send you marketing by email or text if:

• you have ticked the box to say you want it; or
• you are an existing client, the message is about products similar to those we have already arranged for you, and you were given the chance to opt out when we first took your details and in every message since.

You can stop it at any time, and it costs you nothing:

• Reply STOP to any text message.
• Click Unsubscribe at the foot of any email.
• Email or call us using the details in section 1 and ask.

Opting out of marketing does not stop messages we have to send you about a product you have already applied for or hold. Those are service messages, not marketing.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with other organisations for their own marketing.

We share your information only where we need to, and only with organisations that are required to keep it secure.

• Lenders, insurers and product providers — to obtain quotes, agreements in principle and full offers. Once you have a product with them, they become a data controller in their own right and their own privacy notice applies.
• Credit reference and fraud prevention agencies — searches may be recorded on your credit file and may be visible to other lenders.
• Mortgage clubs, networks, packagers and sourcing systems we use to place business.
• Conveyancers, surveyors, solicitors, estate agents and accountants connected with your transaction, where you have asked us to deal with them.
• Our suppliers — including our customer relationship management, email, text messaging, telephony, IT support and document storage providers, who process information on our instructions only.
• Our professional advisers — accountants, auditors, insurers and lawyers.
• Regulators and authorities — the Financial Conduct Authority, the Financial Ombudsman Service, HM Revenue & Customs, the Information Commissioner's Office, and law enforcement where we are required to cooperate.
• A buyer, if the business or part of it is ever sold or transferred.

Some of the technology suppliers we rely on — including our customer relationship management and messaging platform — are based outside the United Kingdom, principally in the United States. That means your information may be stored or accessed there.

Where that happens, we make sure it is protected to a standard equivalent to UK law, using one or more of the following:

• a UK "adequacy" decision covering the country concerned;
• the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses; or
• the supplier's certification under the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards we rely on by contacting us using the details in section 1.

We keep your information for as long as we need it, and no longer. We do not apply a single fixed period to everything, because the right period genuinely differs depending on what the information is and what it was collected for.

Instead, we decide how long to keep each record using the following criteria:

• How long our regulator requires us to keep it. The Financial Conduct Authority sets record-keeping obligations for advice files, and we meet them.
• How long a complaint or a claim could realistically be brought. For some products this is a matter of years. For life cover, critical illness, income protection and equity release it can be very much longer, because a claim or a question about the advice may arise decades after the recommendation was made. We keep those records for as long as we may need to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim — which, for that kind of advice, means we do not routinely delete them.
• What other law requires. Anti-money-laundering and tax rules each set their own minimum periods, and we meet those.
• Whether we still have a relationship with you. An enquiry that never became a client relationship is kept for a much shorter time than a completed case.
• Whether you have asked us to stop. Where you opt out of marketing we keep a minimal record of that decision for as long as needed to prove we honoured it — deleting it entirely would risk contacting you again by mistake.

Recordings of calls and the notes of your case are treated as part of the same file and follow the same periods. CCTV footage is an exception and is kept only for as long as it is needed for the security purpose it was recorded for.

If you want to know how long we will hold a specific record of yours, ask us. We will tell you, using the contact details in section 1.

You have the following rights over your information. They are free to use, and we will respond within one month.

• Access — ask for a copy of the information we hold about you.
• Correction — have inaccurate or incomplete information put right.
• Erasure — ask us to delete information, where we no longer have a good reason to keep it. This right is limited: we usually cannot delete advice files that FCA rules require us to retain.
• Restriction — ask us to pause using your information while a query about it is resolved.
• Objection — object to us using your information where we rely on legitimate interests. If you object to direct marketing, we will stop, always and without question.
• Portability — receive certain information in a machine-readable format, or have it sent to another organisation.
• Withdraw consent — where we rely on your consent, withdraw it at any time. That does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.

To use any of these rights, contact us using the details in section 1. We may need to confirm your identity first.

We do not make decisions about you by automated means alone. Some lenders and insurers do use automated credit scoring and underwriting as part of their own decision-making. Where that happens, they will tell you about it, and you have the right to ask them for a human review of the outcome.

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your information, including access controls, encryption in transit, and restricting access to those who need it to do their job. We require our suppliers to do the same. If a breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights, we will report it to the Information Commissioner's Office, and tell you where the law requires it.

Our websites use cookies and similar technologies. Some are necessary for the site to work; others help us understand how the site is used or measure whether our advertising is effective. Non-essential cookies are only set with your consent, which you can change at any time.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first using the details in section 1, so we have the chance to put it right.

You also have the right to complain to the UK's data protection regulator:

Complaints about the financial advice itself, rather than about your information, are handled separately — please ask us for a copy of our complaints procedure.

We review this notice regularly and will update it when our practices change. The version number and date at the top of the page tell you when it was last revised. Where a change is significant, we will bring it to your attention.