We might use your personal data to:

• get in touch with you by post, email or telephone
• verify your identity where we need to
• understand what you need and how we can achieve this
• maintain our records in accordance with legal and regulatory obligations
• process financial transactions
• provide you with information on our services, events and activities that we think you’ll be interested in – you’ll have needed to provide your consent for us to send you information on these
• ask you your thoughts and opinions on the services we provide
• let you know about any changes to our services
• prevent and detect crime, fraud and corruption.

5. How long do we keep your personal data?

We’ll hang on to personal data after we have used it, as set out below.

When assessing how long we keep your personal data, we think about:

• the requirements of our business and the services we provide
• any statutory or legal obligations
• the reason why we originally collected the personal data
• the lawful grounds on which we base our processing
• the types of personal data we’ve collected
• the amount and categories of your personal data
• whether the purpose of the processing could reasonably be fulfilled in other ways.

We’ll keep your data for six years too – even if we stop working with you

Legislation, regulations and our professional indemnity insurers ask us to retain your data after we’ve stopped acting for you. The period of data retention varies but it’s typically five or six years. So, we keep it for six just to make sure. Where we can, we measure how long we keep the data from the end of the accounting period to which it relates.

6. Where there’s a change of purpose

If we need to use your data for another purpose other than the reason we collected it, we’ll only do this if the new purpose is compatible with the original one.

If we think it’s necessary to use your personal data for a new purpose, we’ll let you know and tell you about the legal side of things before we start any new processing of your data.

7. Who has access to your personal data?

We won’t sell or rent your information to third parties.

We won’t share your information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Any of our people with access to your information have a duty of confidentiality. These fall under the ethical standards, which we’re all required to follow.

8.      People (or “Third Party Service Providers”) working on our behalf

In some cases, we use other people (or what we call “third party service providers”) to deliver professional advice and cloud-based information storage facilities.

Whenever we use third party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that’s necessary to deliver the service. We also have a contract in place that requires them to keep your information secure and not to use it for their own purposes.

All of our third party service providers are required to take commercially reasonable and appropriate security measures to protect your personal data.

We’ll not release your information to other third parties unless you’ve requested that we do so, or we’re required to do so by law. For example, by a court order or for the purposes of prevention and detection of crime, fraud or corruption.

9.      Security measures in place to prevent the loss, misuse or alteration of your personal data

We’ve put security measures in place to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way. We also limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They’ll only process your personal data on our instructions and they’re subject to a duty of confidentiality.

We’ve put procedures in place to deal with any suspected data security breaches. If this happens, we’ll notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we’re legally required to do so.

Your data will usually be processed in our offices in the UK. However, to allow us to operate efficient digital processes, we sometimes need to store information in servers located outside the UK. When we do this, your data remains within the European Economic Area (EEA). We’d never transfer your data to somewhere outside the EEA.

10.   Your duty to inform us of changes in your personal data

It’s important that the personal data we hold about you is accurate and current. If it changes, please let us know of any changes of which we need to be made aware by getting in touch with your usual Provantage Corporate Finance contact or using the contact details below.

11. Your rights in connection with personal data

Under certain circumstances, by law you have the right to:

• ask for access to your personal data. You can have access to all the personal data we hold about you and you can check that we’re processing it lawfully
• ask us to correct the personal data that we hold about you
• ask us to delete your personal data. This means we’ll remove personal data where there’s no good reason for us to continue to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you’ve objected to us processing it (see below)
• object to us processing your personal data where we’re relying on a legitimate interest of ours or a third party, and you have a situation which makes you want to object to us processing your data. You also have the right to object on these grounds when it comes to direct marketing purposes
• ask for the restriction of the processing of your personal data. This means you can ask us to suspend the processing of personal data about you
• ask for the transfer of your personal data to you or another data controller if the processing is based on consent, carried out by automated means and this is technically possible.

If you wish to exercise any of these rights, please get in touch with us. Our contact details are below.

It’s worth mentioning: you won’t have to pay a fee to access your personal data (or to exercise any of the other rights). However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive. It’s not like us, but we might even decline to comply with the request in such circumstances.

Also, to confirm your identity, we might need to request specific information from you. This is to ensure your right to access the information or to exercise any of your other rights, and to make sure your personal information isn’t disclosed to anyone who has no right to receive it.