Contents

  1. Definitions
  2. Data Protection Law
  3. When we collect personal information
  4. Personal information we collect
  5. How we use your information
  6. Marketing preferences
  7. Retention of your information
  8. Location of your information
  9. Your rights
  10. Customer complaints
  11. Changes to this privacy declaration
  12. How to find out more

1. Definitions

In this Privacy Declaration, unless the context otherwise requires:

  • Agreement:
    means a regulated consumer credit agreement between you and Ampla Finance.
    Ampla (“We, us, our”):
    means Ampla Consumer Finance Limited trading as Ampla Finance (“ACFL”), together with Ampla Operations Limited, an appointed representative of ACFL, and any person to whom any of ACFL’s respective rights and/or duties in connection with the Agreement with you are transferred.
    Group:
    means any company within the Ampla group of companies. More information about Ampla can be found at https://ampla.finance.
    Professional Firm:
    means a professional firm such as solicitors, accountants, financial advisers, brokers or estate administrators who has been instructed in relation to your legal proceedings (for Family Law Loans), or in relation to the inherited Estate in which you have an interest (for Legacy Loans).
    Website:
    means our website https://ampla.finance and our online platform for Family Law loans (the “Ampla Hub”).

2. Data Protection Law

We are the data controller in respect of the information that you give to us and which we hold about you.

If we propose to enter into an Agreement with you, it is a condition of you being assessed for that purpose for you to provide us with the personal information that we request from you which it is necessary for us to have for the purpose of entering into the Agreement with you, administering the Agreement and for other purposes described below. If you fail to provide us with the information we request from you, we will not be able to proceed with the checks that we need to perform to enter into the Agreement (described below) and, subsequently, we will not enter into the Agreement with you.

3. When we collect personal information

  • a. When making an enquiry:
    When you make an enquiry through our website or by email or by telephone, we will ask you for personal information so we can contact you.
    b. When applying for finance:
    When you or your Professional Firm applies for finance for you, through the Website or by email, and when we contact you by email or telephone in relation to your application, we will ask you and the Professional Firm for personal information in order to assess your creditworthiness and affordability for finance in accordance with our credit policy. We may also ask you and the Professional Firm for additional personal information including information about your health. Please see ‘Personal information we collect’ below for further details on the types of data we collect about you.
    c. When entering into and administering an Agreement with ACFL:
    When entering into an Agreement with us, you supply us with personal information. We will also gather information about you during your Agreement, such as whenever we request an update from you or your Professional Firm, or if your Professional Firm provides us with information about you.
    d. When you or the Professional Firm contacts us:
    We will keep copies of correspondence if it is material. We may also record and store telephone conversations between you and us, or between us and your Professional Firm, for a period of up to 2 years. We’ll keep a record on our systems of any contact we have with you or your Professional Firm, but we won’t keep or record anything that is unnecessary.
    e. When using the Website:
    When you visit the Website we collect industry standard log data that will provide us with information about your visit. This includes but is not limited to information such as your location, browser type, operating system, which pages you have visited, how you have reached the Website, the date of your visit and the Internet protocol (IP) address assigned to you by your internet service. We use this information to provide you with relevant information and ensure that the Website is working properly. We may ask for further information from you should you report a problem with the Website.
    We collect some of this information using cookies – please see our Cookie Policy for further information. We also use Google Analytics to collect tracking information about you.
    f. If your Professional Firm registers you on our Ampla Hub:
    If your Professional Firm registers an account on the Ampla Hub on your behalf in relation to a Family Law loan, they will provide us with your information about you, your legal proceedings and any associated cases.

4. Personal information we collect

The personal information we collect from the activities above is described below. This is information that you or your Professional Firm gives to us through the Website or by email or telephone:

  • Personal details including name, gender, date of birth, residential address and address history, contact details such as email address and telephone numbers, nationality and residency.
  • Financial information including information on your personal assets, liabilities, income and employment details.
  • Information contained in identification documents, including passport, driving licence and household bills.
  • Details of your family members including dependants.
  • Information on your health and any significant medical conditions or illnesses.
  • For Family Law Loans – details of your legal proceedings and associated documents, legal fees and expected settlement amount.
  • For Legacy Loans – details of the Deceased and their personal representatives, the beneficiaries of the Deceased’s Estate, Professional Firms involved in settling the affairs and estate of the Deceased, and details of the assets and liabilities in the Estate in which you have an interest.

We will request certain personal information about you from your Professional Firm and from credit reference and fraud prevention agencies. Please see ‘Credit Referencing and Fraud Prevention’ below for further information.

5. How we use your information

  • (A) Before We Enter Into an Agreement with You:
    • Purpose
      Before we provide financing to you, we may undertake checks for the purposes of preventing fraud and money laundering, to verify your identity and to assess whether you are sufficiently likely to repay amounts which you would owe to us if you were to enter into an Agreement. We may assess information on your health, if we believe there is a risk you could pass away before your loan from Ampla Finance has been repaid. These checks require us to process personal data about you which you have provided, we have collected from you or we have received from Professional Firms or other third parties. This personal data will be used to prevent fraud and money laundering, to allow us to assess the credit risk of entering into an Agreement with you, and to verify your identity.
      Lawful basis of processing
      We process your personal data on the basis that we have a legitimate interest and legal obligation in preventing fraud and money laundering, and to verify identity, in order to protect our business, to assess the credit risk of entering into an Agreement with you, and to comply with laws that apply to us. Such processing is also a contractual requirement of the financing you have requested.
  • (B) Administration:
    • Purpose
      We will use your information to administer your Agreement with us. We will use your information to obtain updates from your Professional Firm in relation to their activities on your behalf, and to contact you regarding any other matter relating to your Agreement.
      Lawful basis of processing
      The use of your information in this way is necessary for the performance of our Agreement with you and, initially, to take steps for us to enter into the Agreement with you.
    • Purpose
      We may pass your information to companies within our Group, who may use and update your information to assess lending risks, to administer your Agreement with us, to recover debts, to prevent, detect and prosecute fraud and other crimes, and to manage our and any member of our Group’s relationship with you.
      Lawful basis of processing
      This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in; establishing any risks in entering into an Agreement with you and any risks throughout the Agreement; recovering any debt owed to us by you; and, for the administration of the Agreement. The Group also has legal obligations that it must comply with (such as to report fraud).
    • Purpose
      We and fraud prevention agencies may also enable law enforcement agencies to access and use your personal data to detect, investigate and prevent crime.
      Lawful basis of processing
      We process your personal data on the basis that we have a legitimate interest and legal obligation in preventing fraud and money laundering.
  • (C) Credit Referencing and Fraud Prevention:
    • Purpose
      In order to process your loan application, we will perform credit and identity checks on you with one or more credit reference agencies (“CRAs”).
      To do this, we will supply your personal information to CRAs and they will give us information about you. This will include information from your loan application and about your financial situation and financial history. CRAs will supply to us both public (including the electoral register) and shared credit, financial situation and financial history information and fraud prevention information.
      We will use this information to:
    • • assess your creditworthiness and whether you can afford to take the loan;
      • verify the accuracy of the data you have provided to us;
      • prevent criminal activity, fraud and money laundering;
      • manage your account;
      • trace and recover debts; and
      • ensure any offers provided to you are appropriate to your circumstances.
      We will continue to exchange information about you with CRAs while you have a relationship with us. We will also inform the CRAs about your settled accounts. If you borrow and do not repay in full and on time, CRAs will record the outstanding debt. This information may be supplied to other organisations by CRAs.
      When CRAs receive a search from us they will place a search footprint on your credit file that may be seen by other lenders.
      If you are making a joint application, or tell us that you have a spouse or financial associate, we will link your records together, so you should make sure you discuss this with them, and share with them this information, before lodging the application. CRAs will also link your records together and these links will remain on your and their files until such time as you or your partner successfully files for a disassociation with the CRAs to break that link.
      The identities of the CRAs, their role also as fraud prevention agencies, the data they hold, the ways in which they use and share personal information, data retention periods and your data protection rights with the CRAs are explained in more detail at https://www.experian.co.uk/crain/index.html. CRAIN is also accessible from each of the three CRAs – clicking on any of these three links will also take you to the same CRAIN document:
      TransUnion https://www.transunion.co.uk/crain;
      Equifax https://www.equifax.co.uk/crain.html;
      Experian http://www.experian.co.uk/crain/index.html.
      Before ACFL provides financing to you, we undertake checks for the purposes of preventing fraud and money laundering, and to verify your identity. These checks require us to process your information. If we, or a fraud prevention agency, determine that you pose a fraud or money laundering risk, ACFL may refuse to provide the financing you have requested. A record of any fraud or money laundering risk will be retained by the fraud prevention agencies, and may result in others refusing to provide services, financing or employment to you. If you have any questions about this, please contact us on the details below.
      Please telephone us on 0800 0096590 if you would like details of the credit reference and fraud prevention agencies from whom we obtain and to whom we pass information about you. You have a legal right to these details. If you would like a copy of the fraud agency Fair Processing Notice this can be found at: https//www.cifas.org.uk/fpn.
      Lawful basis of processing
      This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests and our legal obligation in establishing any risks in entering into an Agreement with you, and any risks throughout the Agreement, and to prevent, detect and prosecute fraud and other crimes.
      Purpose
      We will give details of the Agreement that you have with ACFL and how it is conducted to credit reference agencies and fraud prevention agencies. If you do not repay your loan in full when required to do so under your loan agreement, we will tell credit reference agencies who will record the outstanding debt. The information at the end of this Privacy Declaration (under ‘How To Find Out More’) provides a link which gives you further details about how credit reference agencies, fraud prevention agencies, we and other lenders use your information in this way.
      Lawful basis of processing
      Use of your information in this way is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in recovering any debt owed to ACFL and for the purposes of our legal obligation to detect and prevent fraud. We currently obtain information from TransUnion (relating to the ‘credit search’) and we currently pass information about you to TransUnion.
      Please contact us at the details provided below in the ‘How to find out more’ section, if you would like the details of the credit reference agency from which we obtain information (relating to the “credit search”) and the credit reference and fraud prevention agencies to which we pass information about you in accordance with this Privacy Declaration.
  • (D) Other Third Parties:
    • Purpose
      We may disclose your personal information to our third party service providers, subcontractors and other organisations (as listed below) for the purposes of providing services to us or directly to you on our behalf.
      Recipient / relationship to us Industry sector
      Insurance brokers and providers Life assurance Life assurance
      Accountancy services Professional services (accountancy)
      Banks, payment processors and financial services providers Financial (banking)
      IT service providers IT (cloud services)
      Financial auditing services Audit (financial)
      Audit (financial) Government (tax)
      Data storage and archiving providers IT (data management)
      Legal and professional advisers Professional services (legal services)
      When we use third party service providers, we only disclose to them any personal information that is necessary for them to provide their services and we have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it other than in accordance with our specific instructions.
      When we share your personal information with third parties that are controllers of that information, they may disclose or transfer it to other organisations in accordance with their data protection policies. This does not affect any of your privacy rights as detailed below. In particular, where you ask us to rectify, erase or restrict the processing of your information, we take reasonable steps to pass this request on to any such third parties with whom we have shared your personal information.
      Lawful basis of processing
      This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests to operate our business and effectively administer your Agreement with us.
      Purpose:
      We may need to give information to the Professional Firm acting on your behalf, or to receive information from your Professional Firm, for the following purposes:
    • • to identify or assess any change or potential change in your financial status or your ability to repay your loan to ACFL;
      • to obtain updates in relation to your legal proceedings (for Family Law Loans) or the Estate in which you have an interest (for Legacy Loans);
      • to enable the Professional Firm to deal with any complaints made by you;
      • to coordinate responses to requests made by you relating to you rights under data protection laws;
      • to effect the exercise of any rights that you have under applicable laws and regulations.
      Lawful basis of processing
      This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in order to protect our business and to comply with relevant data protection laws that apply to us.
      Purpose
      If ACFL becomes entitled to terminate the Agreement with you, we may pass your information to a debt collection agency in connection with recovery of monies due on your Agreement.
      Lawful basis of processing
      Use of your information in this way is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests in recovering any debt owed to ACFL.
      Purpose
      We will share your information with other organisations if we sell or buy any business or assets (as we will share your data with the prospective seller or buyer), or if we or substantially all of our company assets are acquired by another party, in which case your information will be one of the transferred assets. These other organisations will also be controllers of your information and are solely responsible for protecting your personal data and processing it in line with data protection laws.
      Lawful basis of processing
      This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests to ensure that we or our business remains commercially viable.
      Purpose
      We will share your information with any funder who provides the finance for your Agreement.
      Lawful basis of processing
      This is necessary for the purpose of our legitimate interests in maintaining our funding lines so that our business remains commercially viable.
  • (E) Call Recording:
    • Purpose
      We may record phone conversations with our customers. If we do so, we will tell you.
      Lawful basis of processing
      This is necessary for the purposes of our legitimate interests to enable us to properly resolve complaints, to improve our service standards and for staff training purposes.
  • (F) Analytics:
    • Purpose
      We will use analytics tools (including Google Analytics) on the Ampla Hub and the Website that are provided to us by third parties acting on our behalf; we will ensure that your information is secure and protected in accordance with our obligations under data protection law.
      Lawful basis of processing
      We use your information in this way as it is necessary for our legitimate interests in (i) detecting fraud by understanding behaviours and patterns that correlate to committing fraud; and (ii) understanding the customer journey so that we can understand your needs and provide a better service to you, and to help us develop and improve our products and services. These tools may process some of your personal data by converting it into statistical or aggregated data.

6. Marketing preferences

You can change the marketing preferences that you have selected at any time – please call Ampla on 0800 0096590.

7. Retention of your information

If your application for finance is declined or if your application is accepted but you do not proceed, we keep your information for 2 years. If your application is accepted and you proceed, we hold your information for up to 7 years from the date at which your Agreement ends or as long as necessary thereafter to deal with any queries you may have.

Information that we provide to credit reference agencies remains on their file for 6 years after your Agreement with us is closed, whether settled by you or upon default. Fraud prevention agencies can hold your personal data for different periods of time, and if you are considered to pose a fraud or money laundering risk, your data can be held for up to 6 years.

We may hold your information for a longer or shorter period from that described above where:

  • the law requires us to hold your personal information for a longer period, or delete it sooner; or
  • you exercise your right to have the information erased (where it applies) and we do not need to hold it in connection with any of the reasons permitted or required under the law; and in limited cases, the law permits us to keep your personal information indefinitely provided we put certain protections in place.

8. Location of your information

The information that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the UK and the European Economic Area (“EEA”). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the UK and the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers. Such staff may be engaged in, among other things, the processing of your payment details and the provision of support services.

Where adequate protections for your information do not exist under the applicable laws of that third country, we (or the party transferring your information) will take necessary steps to ensure that appropriate safeguards are put in place to maintain the same levels of protection as are needed under UK data protection legislation. Safeguards include imposing contractual obligations on the recipient of your information or subscription to ‘international frameworks’ that ensure adequate protection. Please contact us for more information about the protections that are in place.

Whenever fraud prevention agencies transfer your personal data outside of the European Economic Area, they impose contractual obligations on the recipients of that data to protect your personal data to the standard required in the European Economic Area. They may also require the recipient to subscribe to ‘international frameworks’ intended to enable secure data sharing.

9. Your rights

Under the General Data Protection Regulation 2016 (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) you have certain rights including the right of access to your personal data. If anything is inaccurate or incorrect, please let us know and we will correct it.

You have the right to

(i) be informed about how your information will be used (at no cost to you)
(ii) ask us to restrict processing,
(iii) if it is technically feasible, transmit your information from our systems to a third party’s system in a safe and secure way,
(iv) object to our use of your information where we are using it for the purposes of our legitimate interests as described in this agreement and your rights outweigh our legitimate interests,
(v) not to be subject to a decision when is it based on automated processing and it produces a legal effect or a similarly significant effect on you and if it does then you have the right to request a human intervention – please contact us using the contact details below for more information about exercising this right
(vi) access your information at no cost (unless your request is unfounded or unreasonable),
(vii) if your information is inaccurate or incomplete, then you can ask us to have it rectified,
(viii) in certain circumstances, you have the right to ask us to delete your personal information.

For more information or to exercise your data protection rights, please contact us using the contact details below. You can also access the ICO website for further information on your data protection rights using the following link: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protection/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/individual-rights/.

10. Customer complaints

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office where your data has or is being used in a way that you believe does not comply with data protection laws. We encourage you to contact us before making any complaint and we will seek to resolve any issues or concerns you may have.

11. Changes to this privacy declaration

We may make changes to this Privacy Declaration at any time by posting a copy of it on the Website. Any changes will take effect 7 days after the date on which we post the modified terms on the Website.

12. How to find out more

You can contact the credit reference agencies currently operating in the UK; the information they hold may not be the same, so it is worth contacting them all. They will charge you a small statutory fee. Alternatively, you can call us on 0800 0096590.

If you have any queries or concerns about the way in which we use your information, or if you want details of the relevant fraud prevention agencies, you can contact us at: Data Protection, Ampla Finance, 322 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7PB, or send an e-mail to support@amplafinance.com with the subject heading “data protection query”.