Personal Data

Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) personal data is defined as:

“any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject'); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person”.

In the context of providing you with assistance in relation to the requested service, your Personal Data may include

• Title, names, date of birth, gender, nationality, civil/marital status, contact details, addresses and documents that are necessary to verify your identity (such as passport and driving license)
• Employment and remuneration information (including salary, bonus schemes, overtime, sick pay, other benefits), employment history
• Bank account details, tax information, loans and credit commitments, personal credit history, sources of income and expenditure, family circumstances and details of dependents
• Telephone Calls, including inbound and outbound calls to our customer services department, or any other agents of The House Crowd

How will we collect your personal information?

You may provide us with information about you by filling in forms on our website at www.thehousecrowd.com by filling in any other forms provided to you by us or by corresponding with us by phone, e-mail or otherwise. This includes information you provide when you register to use our Site, request an information pack, comply with our requests for additional information and when you report a problem with our Site.

How we use your information?

This privacy notice tells you how we, The House Crowd, will collect and use your personal data for providing further information regarding the provision of independent financial investment services.

Why does The House Crowd need to collect and store personal data?

In order for us to provide our Clients with financial investment services (including peer to peer lending, property development investment, and Innovative Finance ISA) we need to collect personal data in order to provide this service. In any event, we are committed to ensuring that the information we collect and use is appropriate for this purpose, and does not constitute an invasion of your privacy.

If you have provided consent for us to do so, The House Crowd may also occasionally contact you with news of our services and investment opportunities which may be of interest. This consent can be removed at any time.

What other personal data may we need?

In order to provide our service to you effectively, we may need to gather personal information about your close family members and dependants. In such cases, it will be your responsibility to ensure that you have the consent of the people concerned to pass their information on to us.

Will The House Crowd share my personal data with anyone else?

Dependent on the financial service being requested, we may pass your personal data on to third-party service providers to The House Crowd. Any third parties that we share your data with are obliged to keep your details securely, and to use them only to quote for, or provide the requested investment service – for example a secured property investment.

When they no longer need your data to fulfil this service, they will dispose of the details in line with Data Retention best practice and internal policy. If we wish to pass your sensitive personal data onto a third party we will only do so once we have obtained your consent, or unless we are legally required to do otherwise.

To fulfil our obligations in respect of prevention of money-laundering and other financial crime we may send your details to third party agencies for identity verification purposes.

Our key third-party Service Providers who we may share your information with are as follows:

• MangoPay – for the processing of all financial transactions within The House Crowd.
• CreditSafe – for the purpose of performing Customer Credit Checks (when required).
• Goji – our partner investment platform allowing The House Crowd to offer innovative Finance ISAs directly to our customers.

How will The House Crowd use the personal data it collects about me?

The primary legal basis that we intend to use for the processing of your Personal Data is for the performance of our contract with you, however there will be instances where the lawful basis is consent. The information that we collect about you is essential for us to be able to carry out the services that you require from us effectively.

The House Crowd will process (collect, store and use) the information you provide in a manner compatible with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We will endeavor to keep your information accurate and up to date, and not keep it for longer than is necessary.

The security of your Personal Data is paramount to us and we have invested in a number of Cyber Security and Privacy initiatives to ensure we have the right level of protection in place to protect your data.

We will always take reasonable steps to safeguard your Personal Data against it being accessed unlawfully or maliciously by any third party.

How long will The House Crowd retain the data it collects about me?

The House Crowd is required to retain information in accordance with the law, such as information needed for income tax and audit purposes. How long certain kinds of personal data should be kept may also be governed by specific business-sector requirements and agreed practices, such as the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) which stipulates the minimum retention periods required for financial data. We reserve the right to retain data for longer where we believe it is in our legitimate interests to do so.

Under what circumstances will The House Crowd contact me?

Our aim is not to be intrusive, and we undertake not to ask irrelevant or unnecessary questions. Moreover, the information you provide will be subject to rigorous measures and procedures to minimise the risk of unauthorised access or disclosure.

Can I find out the personal data that the organisation holds about me?

The House Crowd at your request, can confirm what information we hold about you and how it is processed. If The House Crowd does hold personal data about you, you can request the following information:

• Identity and the contact details of the person or organisation that has determined how and why to process your data. In some cases, this will be a representative in the EU.
• Contact details of the GDPR Owner, where applicable.
• The purpose of the processing as well as the legal basis for processing.
• If the processing is based on the legitimate interests of The House Crowd or a third party, information about those interests.
• The categories of personal data collected, stored and processed.
• Recipient(s) or categories of recipients that the data is/will be disclosed to.
• If we intend to transfer the personal data to a third country or international organisation, information about how we ensure this is done securely. The EU has approved sending personal data to some countries because they meet a minimum standard of data protection. In other cases, we will ensure there are specific measures in place to secure your information.
• How long the data will be stored.
• Details of your rights to correct, erase, restrict or object to such processing.
• Information about your right to withdraw consent at any time.
• How to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority.
• Whether the provision of personal data is a statutory or contractual requirement, or a requirement necessary to enter into a contract, as well as whether you are obliged to provide the personal data and the possible consequences of failing to provide such data.
• The source of personal data if it wasn’t collected directly from you.
• Any details and information of automated decision making, such as profiling, and any meaningful information about the logic involved, as well as the significance and expected consequences of such processing.

What forms of ID will I need to provide in order to access this?

The House Crowd accepts either Passport or Driving Licence as valid forms of ID when information on your personal data is requested. This is to ensure that we are able to verify your identity before disclosing any personal information.

Cookies

Like many websites, we use cookies to track visitor use of the website and to compile statistical reports on website activity. For further information visit http://www.allaboutcookies.org

You can set your browser not to accept cookies and the above website tells you how to remove cookies from your browser. However, in a few cases some of our website features may not function as a result.

The following cookies are used on our website:

Essential cookies: These are cookies that are required for our website to function correctly and enable you to carry out such actions as login to your account on the website. These cookies do not ever gather information about you that could be used for marketing purposes, or track your movements on the internet.

Analytical and Performance cookies: These allow us to collate information about how you use our website and your experience with it. Please note all data collected is anonymous and is used purely to improve our users experience on the website, and help us measure how effective our marketing and advertising is.

Functionality cookies: These are used to recognise you each time you use our website, so you do not keep having to input, say, your email address.

The cookies we use are:

1. 'Cake Cookie Auth': used for remembering email addresses.
2. 'Tawk To': a third party plugin for our Live Chat utility.
3. 'Cloudflare': a third party plugin for Cloudflare which protects our website.
4. 'XSRF-TOKEN': – for verifying it is your device making requests to our website
5. 'The_house_crowd_session': – for persistent data generated by our website to create a comfortable and logical user experience

Google Analytics

The House Crowd, like many other Organisations use Google Analytics to provide us with analytical data on our website traffic and user behavior. You can refer to privacy.google.com/businesses to learn more about Google’s data privacy policies and approach.

Changes to our Privacy Statement

We keep our Privacy Statement under regular review and we will inform you of any changes when they occur. This Privacy Statement was last updated in May 2018.

Contact details of the GDPR Owner:

For any GDPR queries please contact Charlotte Hall of The House Crowd on:

• Tel: 0161 667 4264
• Email: [email protected]
• Address: 91-95 Hale Rd, Hale, Altrincham WA15 9HW

The right to lodge a complaint with a Supervisory Authority

The House Crowd are committed in protecting your personal information, however if you have any concerns regarding the way that we are storing or processing your personal information, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. In the UK this is the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) and more information can be found on their website https://ico.org.uk/concerns/.