In this Privacy Policy, references to “we” or “us” are to Rooted Finance, a company incorporated under the Companies Act 2006 (registration number 07205478), a registered charity (reference number 1138351) authorized and registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (firm reference 627716) whose registered office is at Unit 4.6, 244-254 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA. 

We will at all times only collect and process your personal information in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), and the Data (Use and Access) Act and any updates to UK data protection law.

Data collection: Data collected from clients may include names, addresses, date of birth, details of income, national insurance, bank account details and/or any other information that we feel appropriate and reasonable to collect in order to deliver our service. All personal information is processed in accordance with the legal basis of consent. Personal data is also processed where necessary for legitimate interests (to provide advice and support services) and to comply with legal and regulatory obligations.

Special Category Data (including health): may be collected and stored with your explicit consent to assist you with your debt solutions or support you to access additional help if your circumstances and situations make you eligible. Sensitive data will be used to make adaptations to our services. 

Data sharing: we may share your personal and sensitive data (with your explicit consent) with third parties such as your creditors or people you owe money to. We may also share your data with evaluators or external third parties with your clear consent to evidence of the impact of our work. We may also disclose anonymised data about you with British Gas Energy Trust, Greater London Authority, Hackney (there may be others) as is required in our contract with them to deliver free debt advice to end users. We will share anonymized data about your case with Advice UK in order to help them assess overall debt trends in the UK.

Home Energy Information: As part of the debt and energy advice we provide, we may collect information about your home’s energy features (such as heating type, insulation, chimney, or double glazing). This information is obtained from publicly available sources. With your consent, this data may be shared with our funders for monitoring and reporting purposes. No personal or identifying information will be shared. 

Open Banking: Rooted Finance uses AperiData (a third-party provider) to use Open Banking data to help complete required financial assessment to offer accurate advice. If you consent to using open banking to share your data, we will share your personal information with AperiData to allow you to access open banking providers platform to complete further consent and share your banking data with RF accordingly. We will not have access to your bank account, the data you will share via open banking will be ‘view only’ data in the same way you may share a bank statement. You will have the right to withdraw your consent to Rooted Finance using Aperidata at any point, however data that you have already shared, and which has been used by Rooted Finance to complete your assessment and offer you advice cannot be deleted from Rooted Finance, this data will be stored for a period of 6 years from the date of your case closure. AperiData processes data under its own privacy policy, which will be shared with you before you provide consent.

Credit Report: Rooted Finance use Trustfolio (a third-party provider) to access credit report data to help complete a comprehensive assessment of debts owed by you and offer your accurate advice. If you consent to using credit report to share your data, we will share your personal information with Trustfolio to access your credit reports. Trustfolio processes data under its own privacy policy which will be shared with you before you provide consent. 

Marketing: We may seek to contact you in future if/when we develop additional services that may be of use to you. You may withdraw consent at any time by writing or calling us directly on details provided below.

File Review: Rooted Finance is subject to quality assurance and regulatory audits. Our current auditors are Recognising Excellence LTD, and or other persons as may change from time to time. As part of these audits these organisations may wish to view the information we hold on you. These organisations are legally required to keep all personal information confidential and abide by data protection regulation. 

Feedback: Rooted Finance or a third party (evaluators/researchers) may contact you for service feedback as part of our review of Debt Advice service and or service impact and quality service standards and our commitment towards continuous improvement. 

Data storage & destruction: After your case has been concluded we will keep your case data for 6 years in secure storage. You can access your information at any time and free of charge. If you would like to access your case data, please provide us with 28 days written notice. After the six-year period your data will be securely destroyed. Rooted Finance securely stores all personal data on electronic databases.

You have the following rights:

  • Where processing is on consent, you have the right to withdraw any and/or all consent at any time. You can do this either by calling us on 0203 475 8811, sending an email to enquiries@rootedfinance.org.uk, or sending a letter to our registered office at: Rooted Finance, 244-254 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA, or by approaching a member of staff. Please ensure that you detail which aspects of the consent you have provided you wish to update in your communication with us. 
  • You have the right to contact us in order to request a copy of the information we hold about you; to access, cancel or correct any information that we hold about you.  
  • You have the right to be forgotten, in certain circumstances you can ask for the data we hold about you to be erased from our records, though if we have given you advice we will not be able to delete your data as we have a legitimate interest to retain this to evidence the quality of our advice if challenged by our regulator the FCA, or if challenged in court. 
  • You have the right of portability – you have the right to have the data we hold about you transferred to another organization or to obtain and reuse your personal data for your own purposes.
  • You have the right to have your personal data corrected if it is inaccurate or incomplete.
  • You have the right to prevent the processing of your personal data under specific circumstances.
  • You have the right to object to direct marketing, processing of your data for research or statistical purposes, and processing of your personal data conducted on the legal basis of legitimate interest or the performance of a task in the public interest or exercise of official authority. 
  • You have rights relating to the conduct of automated individual decision-making and profiling.
  • You have the right to be informed of appropriate details regarding how your personal information is processed.  
  • We will respond to any request to exercise your data rights within one calendar month, unless an extension is permitted under data protection law. 

Complaints About Personal Data: If your complaint relates to how we use your personal data: 

  • We will handle this under our data protection process
  • You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) if you are not satisfied 

ICO Contact: 

▪ Website: www.ico.org.uk