Ash-Ridge Asset Management Limited - Privacy Policy

Who are we?

Ash-Ridge Asset Management Limited is a private limited company registered at Companies House (No.4941916) and is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (No. 401000) in its capacity of an independent Financial Adviser.

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 and the General Data Protection Regulation (2018) the person responsible is: The Data Protection Officer, Temple Chambers, 3-7 Temple Avenue, London, EC4Y 0HP. To whom any questions regarding our privacy policy should be sent.

This Policy explains when and why we collect personal information about people who enquire about our financial advice services and/or become clients. The policy also explains how we use that information, the conditions under which we may disclose information to others and how we keep personal information secure.

When using the term “personal data” in our Privacy Policy, we mean information that relates to you and allows us to identify you, either directly or in combination with other information that we may hold.

How we collect information from you

We collect information about you from a variety of sources, including meetings, telephone conversations, emails and our website.

What type of information is collected?

The personal information we collect might include your name, address and email address, and information about your health, lifestyle, finances and investments to provide you the most appropriate financial, investment, protection and mortgage advice.

We may also ask you to provide evidence of your identity, such as asking for a copy of your passport, driving licence, and proof of residence or income. We are required to ask for this information to comply with legislation such as money laundering regulations and the Financial Services Act.

We do not hold client monies, however, your bank account information may be required to provide deposit and payment facilities requested by you with your agreed product and service providers.

Cookies

The Ash-Ridge website uses cookies – small text files that are stored on your computer or in your browser – to help us to monitor how visitors use our site. The website does not store or capture personal information about you when you visit it, it merely records traffic information. This means information about all of our visitors collectively, for example, the number of visits the website receives. In order to respect our visitors’ rights of privacy, this information is anonymous and no individual visitor can be identified from it.

You can disable and delete cookies by changing the appropriate setting within your browser’s ‘Help’, ‘Tools’ or ‘Settings’ menu. Please note that by disabling cookies, you may not benefit from some of the features of our site. You can find out more about deleting or controlling cookies by visiting aboutcookies.org.

How we use your personal information

We use personal information about you in connection with the following purposes:

1. Financial Advice, Information, Services, Products and Account Management that you have requested from us.
2. Arrange, check and complete any transactions you are undertaking through us with existing or new product providers.
3. Compliance with our legal, insurance and regulatory obligations
4. Administer internal business administration and operations, including file management, data storage, data analysis, testing, research, statistical and survey purposes.
5. Notification of changes to our services and to help keep your data safe and secure
6. To resolve disputes

Your individual rights

The accuracy of your information is important to us and an essential part of the financial services we provide to you. The General Data Protection Regulations (2018) entitle you to certain rights in respect of your personal data, including the rights relating to information, access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and profiling.

Opting out

You have a choice about whether or not you wish to receive marketing information from us.

We will not contact you for marketing purposes unless you have given your prior consent. You can change your marketing preferences at any time by contacting us.

Requests for access to Personal Information

We are happy to provide you with details of your Personal Information that we hold or process. To protect our customers’ personal information, we follow strict storage and disclosure procedures, which mean that we may require proof of identity from you prior to disclosing such information. We may charge a small administration fee in relation to any requests for access to personal information. Please direct any such request to the Data Protection Officer.

Raising a complaint about how we have handled your personal data

If you wish to raise a complaint about how we have handled your personal data, you can contact our Data Protection Officer as set out above, who will then investigate the matter.

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your personal data in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) – details can be found here: https://ico.org.uk/concerns

Sharing your personal information

We may pass your information to administration centres, third-party service providers, agents, subcontractors and other associated organisations for the purposes of completing tasks and providing services to you on our behalf.

These third parties may include:

Investment platforms, Fund managers, Pension providers, Insurance companies, Mortgage and Finance companies, Insurance brokers and Credit brokers to enable us to obtain quotations, services and information for you.

Credit reference agencies and other companies for use in credit decisions and fraud prevention.

When we use third-party service providers, we disclose only the personal information that is necessary to deliver the service and not to use it for their own direct marketing purposes.

We also work closely with various third-party product and service providers to bring you a range of high quality financial services. When you enquire about or invest in one or more of these products or services, the relevant third-party provider will use your details to carry out their obligations arising from any contracts you have entered into with them. These third-party providers will share your information with us which we will use in accordance with this Privacy Policy.

We may transfer your personal information to a third party as part of a sale of some, or all, of our business and assets or as part of any business restructuring or reorganisation, or if we are under a duty to disclose or share your personal data in order to comply with any legal obligation. However, we will take steps to ensure that your privacy rights continue to be protected.

We will not sell, trade or rent your personal data.

Keeping your information safe

We take our responsibility to look after your personal information and privacy seriously. In today’s world, we have all seen a growing trend in cybercrime and security breaches. We have a number of security measures in place to help prevent fraud and cybercrime.

If we become aware that a personal data breach has occurred and is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of our clients or employees, we will inform them without undue delay.

We educate and train our employees and liaise with our contractors on their own, fraud prevention and privacy obligations to adhere to the Data Protection Act to keep your information safe.

We also educate our employees in identifying potential financial crime and internal fraud; any suspicious activity is reported to our Data Protection officer.

We use technical security measures to make sure our data systems are protected from unauthorised access. Tools such as authentication controls, antivirus, firewalls, malware detection and back-up procedures are used.

The purpose of Business Continuity Management we have a back-up recovery plan that supports the timely and full restoration of our products and services for our clients.

However, whilst we take appropriate technical and organisational measures to safeguard your Personal Information, please note that we cannot guarantee the security of any data that you transfer over the internet to us.

Transferring your information outside of the European Union

This may happen if any of our servers are or become located in a country outside of the EU. If we transfer your information outside of the EU in this way, we will take steps to ensure that your privacy rights continue to be protected as outlined in this Policy.

If you use our services while you are outside the EU, your information may be transferred outside the EU in order to provide you with those services.

Monitoring

Please note that if you communicate with us electronically, including by e-mail, telephone or fax, this communication may be randomly monitored and/or recorded to protect the interests of our business and our customers. This includes for the purposes of maintaining customer/service quality standards, detection of and/or prevention of crime and to ensure that our employees and contractors comply with legal obligations.

Review of this Policy

We may make changes to this Privacy Policy from time to time, including as part of the new European data protection legislation which came into effect on 25 May 2018 (the “General Data Protection Regulation”) – we will update the Privacy Policy and we will publish on our website any new version of this Policy.