The Beaufort Group is committed to protecting the individual privacy rights and choices of all our clients, visitors to our site and the personal information you share with us.
Our Privacy Notice contains important information about the types of personal information we collect and process, what we do with it; who we may share it with and why; and your rights when it comes to the personal information you provide us with.
We may need to make changes to our Privacy Notice in line with regulatory requirements; so please check our website for updates from time to time. If there are significant changes such as where your personal data will be processed; we will contact you to let you know.
This version of our Privacy Notice was last updated on 1st November 2021.
We are The Beaufort Group of Companies Limited, a company registered in England & Wales. Company No: 07902965 Registered office: Brennan House, Farnborough Aerospace Centre Business Park, Farnborough, GU14 6XR.
This Privacy Notice applies to The Beaufort Group and its subsidiaries (the legal trading companies that manage the products and services we offer to our UK customers), incorporating:
We have appointed an independent Data Protection Officer (DPO) through the outsourced services of Sapphire Consulting Group. This is to ensure the United Kingdom General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA 18) are adhered to across the Beaufort Group and its subsidiaries compliantly with the data subject placed at the centre of our business. If you have any questions about our Privacy Notice or the information we collect or use about you, please contact us at:
DPO,
The Beaufort Group,
PO Box 894,
Stockport Central Delivery Office
Green Lane, Stockport, SK4 2HQ
Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to continually improve our site and optimise your browsing experience.
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.
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/performance cookies. They 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).
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.
You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below:
Cookie | Name | Purpose | More information |
Necessary
|
__cfduid | Used by the content network, Cloudflare, to identify trusted web traffic.
|
https://allaboutcookies.org
|
Statistics | _ga | Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.
|
https://allaboutcookies.org
|
Statistics | _gat | Used by Google Analytics to throttle request rate
|
https://allaboutcookies.org
|
Statistics
|
_gid | Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.
|
https://allaboutcookies.org
|
Marketing
|
Collect (Google Analytics)
|
Used to send data to Google Analytics about the visitor’s device and behaviour. Tracks the visitor across devices and marketing channels.
|
https://allaboutcookies.org
|
Unclassified | DYNSRV | Unclassified
|
https://allaboutcookies.org |
Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.
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 site.
Depending on how you choose to interact with us, the information about you that we collect and process includes:
We may collect your personal information directly from you, or from a variety of sources, including:
If you use one of our Financial Advisers, the information we collect and use will most likely have been provided by them on your behalf. We may also collect personal information on you from places such as business directories and other commercially or publicly available sources e.g. to verify your identity, to comply with our anti-money laundering and financial crime obligations, check or improve the information we hold (like your address) or to give better contact information if we are unable to contact you directly.
We take your privacy seriously and we will only ever collect and use information that is personal to you where it is necessary, fair and lawful to do so. We will collect and use your information only where:
If you do not wish us to collect and use your personal information in these ways, it may mean that we will be unable to provide you with our products or services. 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:
In order to process applications you choose to make through one of our subsidiaries, we may supply your personal information to credit reference agencies (CRAs) who will give us information about you, such as 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.
For more information about CRAs, please visit https://www.experian.co.uk/crain/index.html or https://www.equifax.co.uk/ein.html
Click here to find out more about the types of lawful basis that we will rely on to process your personal data.
We rely on consent as a legal basis for processing your personal data only in relation to sending third party or direct marketing communications to you. You have the right to withdraw consent to marketing at any time by contacting us.
We sometimes use systems to make automated decisions based on personal information we have – or are allowed to collect and use from others – about you. These automated decisions can affect the products, services or features we offer you now or in the future. We use automated decisions in the following ways:
For further information on your rights relating to automated decisions, please see the section on YOUR INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS.
We may share your information with third parties for the reasons outlined in ‘What we collect and use your information for.’ These third parties include:
We will never sell your details to someone else. Whenever we share your personal information, we will do so in line with our obligations to keep your information safe and secure.
Our website may contain links to enable you to visit other websites of interest easily. Once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy notice. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy notice applicable to the website in question.
The majority of your information is processed in the United Kingdom. However, some of your information may be processed by us or the third parties we work with outside of the UK, such as the EEA, the US, Australia and India.
Where your information is being processed outside of the UK, we take additional steps to ensure that your information is protected to at least an equivalent level as would be applied by UK data privacy laws e.g. we will put in place legal agreements with our third party suppliers and do regular checks to ensure they meet these obligations.
Our security controls are aligned to industry standards and good practice; providing a controlled environment that effectively manages risks to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your information.
We take information and system security very seriously and we strive to comply with our obligations at all times. Any personal information which is collected, recorded, or processed in any way, whether on paper, online or any other media, will have appropriate safeguards applied in line with our data protection responsibilities.
Your information is protected by controls designed to minimise loss or damage through accident, negligence or deliberate actions. Our employees are trained to protect sensitive or confidential information when storing or transmitting data in any medium including electronically and must undertake annual refresher exercises on this.
We will keep your personal information where it is necessary to provide you with our products or services while you are a customer with us and where it is reasonably required for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice. We are also subject to regulatory requirements to retain your data for specified minimum periods. These are, generally:
We may also keep your information after this period but only where it is required to meet our legal, regulatory, tax or accounting obligations. For example, we are required to retain accurate records of your dealings with us to respond to any complaints, challenges, litigation or queries that you or others may raise in the future. Therefore, length of time we keep your information for these purposes will vary depending on the obligations we need to meet and can be viewed in our data retention policy.
You have several rights in relation to how The Beaufort Group processes your information. They are:
The right to be informed You have a right to receive clear and easy to understand information on what personal information we have, why we have it and who we share it with. This can be found in our Privacy Notices.
The right of access You have the right of access to your personal information. If you wish to receive a copy of the personal information we hold on you, you may make a Data Subject Access Request (DSAR) by contacting us using the methods provided above in the ‘How to contact us’ section.
The right to request that your personal information be rectified If you believe the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate or incomplete, you can request that it is corrected.
The right to request erasure You can ask for your information to be deleted or removed if there is not a compelling reason for The Beaufort Group to continue to have it.
The right to restrict processing You can ask that we block or suppress the processing of your personal information for certain reasons. This means that we are still permitted to keep your information – but only to ensure we don’t use it in the future for those reasons you have restricted.
The right to data portability You can ask for a copy of your personal information for your own purposes to use across different services. In certain circumstances, you may move, copy or transfer the personal information we hold to another company in a safe and secure way. For example, if you were moving your pension to another pension provider.
The right to object You can object to The Beaufort Group processing your personal information where: it’s based on our legitimate interests (including profiling); for direct marketing (including profiling); and if we were using it for scientific/historical research and statistics.
Rights related to automatic decision-making including profiling You have the right to ask The Beaufort Group to:
We would like to send you information about our products and services and those of other companies in our Group which may be of interest to you. If you have agreed to receive marketing information, you may opt out at a later date.
You have a right at any time to stop us from contacting you for marketing purposes or giving your information to other members of the Group. If you no longer wish to be contacted for marketing purposes, please use the contact details at the top of this notice.
We will always strive to collect, use and safeguard your personal information in line with data protection laws under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and Data Protection Act 2018 (DPA18). If you do not believe we have handled your information as set out in our Privacy Notice, please write to us using the contact details above and we will do our utmost to make things right. If you are still unhappy, you can make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office, who are the UK’s independent authority charged with upholding information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. You can contact them at: https://ico.org.uk/