DATA PROTECTION ACT 1998 – USE OF YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION
As you may be aware, the UK is one of the most highly regulated financial centres in the world. This is to safeguard the interests of consumers and other persons purchasing and being advised about investments, insurance and other financial products and in use of their personal data. Against this
backdrop, we are required to make certain regulatory and statutory declarations to you.
If instructed by you, we collect data during our initial and other meetings with you about you and your
family. We will also be collecting data about you and your family from other persons. We collect the
data through note-taking and filling in of questionnaires about you and your family’s circumstances.
We may make checks with credit rating agencies to authenticate and verify your identity and credit
status. We also make checks with Institutions with whom you have policies of insurance and
investments and with your mortgage provider. These checks are to help us with our obligations at
law and generally to ensure that we provide you with advice that suits your circumstances. The scope
and extent of the gathering of information from third parties depends on what type of service you are
taking from us.
How is your information used?
Primarily, we use your data and data about your family’s circumstances to provide advice to you and
complete transactions on your behalf. We analyse and assess your data to maintain and develop our
relationships with you.
Depending on the instructions we receive from you, we may pass your data to other professional
advisers to enable us to provide advice most suited to your circumstances. Usually, this would be
referrals to local accountants, solicitors, tax advisers and sometimes to specialist advisers in the
financial and insurance industry where we do not feel we have appropriate expertise. We, and any
third party specialist advisers to whom we introduce you, will, of course, pass your data to Institutions
if you agree to purchase or amend policies and products as part of the sales and advice process.
We will retain your data according to the statutory requirements for regulatory products. For instance,
if you are given specialist pension advice, the data will be retained indefinitely. If you want details of
the statutory retention periods for various product types please contact us and we will obtain the
latest legal position on your behalf.
Your data is held in our offices in computer-based and paper-based filing systems.
New products
We have a wide portfolio of financial and insurance products available to us. We believe these are
some of the best and most appropriate in the marketplace. We would also like to be able to contact
you so that we can further advise you of developments of new products that might be suited to you.
We also might advise you of legal developments that might make it appropriate for us, or for third
parties, to give you pro-active advice about the investments, insurance and other financial products of
which we are aware. We stress that your information would only be used in this way to help us to
provide a pro-active service to you. As we all know, time is precious and none of us want to be
bombarded with information that is simply not relevant or which we do not require. You can contact
us at our usual address if you do not wish your information to be used in this way.
Your right to a copy of your personal data
Under the Data Protection Act you have a right, upon payment of a fee, currently £10, to obtain a
copy of the personal information that we hold about you. If you believe that any information held is
incorrect or incomplete, you should contact us at our usual address. Any information that is found to
be incorrect or incomplete will be amended promptly.
Thank you for your time and I confirm that we are at all times committed to making sure that, as you
are a customer of a company authorised directly by the FSA, you receive the best service and
products available in the marketplace.