Last updated April 2018
Your information will be held by Bank of Scotland plc, which is part of Lloyds Banking Group. This privacy notice is to let you know how companies within the Group promise to look after your personal information. This includes what you tell us about yourself, what we learn by having you as a customer, and the choices you give us about what marketing you want us to send you. This notice also tells you about your privacy rights and how the law protects you.
We promise:
This section tells you who we are, what your personal information is, and how we get it. It explains how the law protects you by controlling what is allowed to happen to it.
3. Groups of Personal Information
4. Where we collect personal information from
5. How long we keep your personal information
This section covers how to complain or withdraw your consent. It also tells you how you can get a copy of your personal information, or ask for it to be changed or removed.
9. How to withdraw your consent
10. Letting us know if your personal information is correct
11. How to get a copy of your personal information
12. What if you want us to stop using your personal information?
This tells you who we share personal information with. It explains what it's used for in marketing, to provide credit and to combat fraud - and how this can affect you.
13. Who we share your personal information with
14. How we work out what marketing you receive
15. How we use your information to make automated decisions
16. Credit Reference Agencies (CRAs)
This section gives you the legal name of the company who holds your personal information – known as the ‘legal entity’ – and tells you how you can get in touch with us.
Lloyds Banking Group is made up of a mix of companies, set up on different legal entities. We'll let you know which you have a relationship with, when you take out a product or service with us.
You can find out more about us at www.lloydsbankinggroup.com.
Contacting us about data privacy
Please use these details to contact us about any of the topics set out in this Privacy notice.
If you have any questions, or want more details about how we use your personal information, you can call us on 0345 721 3141 (+44 1313 37 42 18 from outside the UK). Lines are open 24/7. Calls may be monitored or recorded.
If you have a hearing or speech impairment you can also call us using the Next Generation Text (NGT) service. Simply dial 18001 and then the telephone number.
If you’re Deaf and a BSL user, you can talk to us live through a BSL interpreter online using our BSL SignVideo service.
These are our main contact details. Some sections of this notice have special contact details that you can use instead.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you can contact our Group Data Protection Officer.
This section sets out the legal reasons we rely on, for each of the ways we may use your personal information.
As well as our Privacy Promise, your privacy is protected by law. This section explains how that works.
Data Protection law says that we are allowed to use personal information only if we have a proper reason to do so. This includes sharing it outside Lloyds Banking Group. The law says we must have one or more of these reasons:
When we have a business or commercial reason of our own to use your information, this is called a ‘legitimate interest’. We will tell you what that is, if we are going to rely on it as the reason for using your data. Even then, it must not unfairly go against your interests.
The law and other regulations treat some types of sensitive personal information as special. This includes information about racial or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, trade union membership, health data, and criminal records. We will not collect or use these types of data without your consent unless the law allows us to do so. If we do, it will only be when it is necessary:
Here is a list of all the ways that we may use your personal information, and which of the reasons we rely on to do so. This is also where we tell you what our legitimate interests are.
What we use your personal information for: | Our reasons | Our legitimate interests |
---|---|---|
Serving you as a customer | ||
• To manage our relationship with you or your business • To develop and carry out marketing activities • To study how our customers use products and services from us and other organisations • To communicate with you about our products and services • To develop and manage our brands, products and services |
• Your consent • Fulfilling contracts • Our legitimate interests • Our legal duty |
• Keeping our records up to date, working out which of our products and services may interest you and telling you about them. • Developing products and services, and what we charge for them • Defining types of customers for new products or services. • Seeking your consent when we need it to contact you • Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties |
Business improvement | ||
• To test new products • To manage how we work with other companies that provide services to us and our customers • To develop new ways to meet our customers' needs and to grow our business |
• Fulfilling contracts • Our legitimate interests • Our legal duty |
• Developing products and services, and what we charge for them • Defining types of customers for new products or services • Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties |
Managing our operations | ||
• To deliver of our products and services • To make and manage customer payments • To manage fees, charges and interest due on customer accounts • To collect and recover money that is owed to us • To manage and provide treasury and investment products and services |
• Fulfilling contracts • Our legitimate interests • Our legal duty |
• Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties • Complying with rules and guidance from regulators |
Managing security, risk and crime prevention | ||
• To detect, investigate, report, and seek to prevent financial crime • To manage risk for us and our customers • To obey laws and regulations that apply to us • To respond to complaints and seek to resolve them |
• Fulfilling contracts • Our legitimate interests • Our legal duty |
• Developing and improving how we deal with financial crime, as well as doing our legal duties in this respect • Complying with rules and guidance from regulators • Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties |
Business management | ||
• To run our business in an efficient and proper way. This includes managing our financial position, business capability, planning, adding and testing systems and processes managing communications, corporate governance, and audit | • Our legitimate interests • Our legal duty |
• Complying with rules and guidance from regulators • Being efficient about how we fulfil our legal and contractual duties |
• To exercise our rights set out in agreements or contracts | • Fulfilling contracts | |
For processing special categories of personal data | ||
• Substantial public interest | • Using criminal records data to help prevent, detect and prosecute unlawful acts and fraudulent behaviour. • Using criminal and health information as needed to provide insurance products. |
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• Responding to regulatory requirements | • Showing whether we have assessed your situation in the right way • Passing information to the regulator as needed to allow investigation into whether we have acted in the right way. |
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• Legal claims | • Using any special categories of data as needed to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. | |
• Consent | • Telling you that we need your consent to process special categories of personal data, when that is what we rely on for doing so. |
This explains what all the different types of personal information mean, that are covered by data protection law.
We use many different kinds of personal information. They are grouped together like this. The groups are all listed here so that you can see what we may know about you, even if we simply get it from seeing which shops you buy things in. We don’t use all this data in the same way. Some of it is useful for marketing, or for providing services to you. But some of it is private and sensitive and we treat it that way.
Types of personal information | Description |
---|---|
Financial |
Your financial position, status and history |
Contact | Your name, where you live and how to contact you |
Socio-Demographic | This includes details about your work or profession, nationality, education and where you fit into general social or income groupings |
Transactional | Details about payments to and from your accounts with us, and insurance claims you make |
Contractual | Details about the products or services we provide to you |
Locational | Data we get about where you are. This may come from your mobile phone or the place where you connect a computer to the internet. It can also include shops where you buy something with your card |
Behavioural |
Details about how you use products and services from us and other organisations |
Technical | Details on the devices and technology you use |
Communications | What we learn about you from letters and emails you write to us, and conversations between us |
Social Relationships | Your family, friends, and other relationships |
Open Data and Public Records | Details about you that are in public records such as the Electoral Register, and information about you that is openly available on the internet |
Usage Data | Other data about how you use our products and services |
Documentary Data | Details about you that are stored in documents in different formats, or copies of them. This could include things like your passport, drivers licence, or birth certificate |
Special types of data |
The law and other regulations treat some types of personal information as special. We will only collect and use these types of data if the law allows us to do so:
You can read how we may use special types of data in the table 'How the law protects you' |
Consents |
Any permissions, consents, or preferences that you give us. This includes things like how you want us to contact you, whether you get paper statements, or prefer large-print formats |
National Identifier |
A number or code given to you by a government to identify who you are, such as a National Insurance number or social security number, or Tax Identification Number (TIN) |
This section lists all the places where we get data that counts as part of your personal information.
We may collect personal information about you (or your business) from other Lloyds Banking Group companies and any of these sources:
Data you give to us
Data we collect when you use our services
This covers two things: details about how and where you access our services, and account activity that is shown on your statement.
Data from outside organisations
* For some insurance products, we may ask your GP or other medical practitioner to send us a report. We will only do this if we get your consent first.
This section explains how long we may keep your information for and why.
We will keep your personal information for as long as you are a customer of Lloyds Banking Group.
We may keep your data for up to 10 years after you stop being a customer. The reasons we may do this are:
We may also keep your data for longer than 10 years if we cannot delete it for legal, regulatory or technical reasons. As an example, we have to hold pension transfer information indefinitely; and in cases of subsidence* we will keep insurance claims data for up to 15 years after you stop being a customer.
We will only use your personal information for those purposes and will make sure that your privacy is protected.
* Subsidence is when a building becomes unsafe or damaged by ground sinking around it.
You can choose not to give us personal information. In this section we explain the effects this may have.
We may need to collect personal information by law, or to enter into or fulfil a contract we have with you.
If you choose not to give us this personal information, it may delay or prevent us from fulfilling our contract with you, or doing what we must do by law. It may also mean that we cannot run your accounts or policies. It could mean that we cancel a product or service you have with us.
We sometimes ask for information that is useful, but not required by law or a contract. We will make this clear when we ask for it. You do not have to give us these extra details and it won't affect the products or services you have with us.
This section contains a link to our Cookies Policy.
Cookies are small computer files that get sent down to your PC, tablet or mobile phone by websites when you visit them. They stay on your device and get sent back to the website they came from, when you go there again. Cookies store information about your visits to that website, such as your choices and other details. Some of this data does not contain personal details about you or your business, but it is still protected by this Privacy notice.
To find out more about how we use cookies, please see our Cookies Policy
This section gives details of how to contact us to make a complaint about data privacy. It also shows you where you can get in touch with the government regulator.
Please let us know if you are unhappy with how we have used your personal information. You can contact us using our secure online contact form.
You also have the right to complain to the regulator, and to lodge an appeal if you are not happy with the outcome of a complaint.
In the UK this is the Information Commissioner’s Office. Find out on their website how to report a concern.
In Jersey, please contact the Office of the Information Commissioner
In Guernsey, please contact the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner
In Isle of Man, please contact the Information Commissioner
This section explains what to do if you no longer want us to hold or use your personal information.
You can withdraw your consent at any time. Please contact us if you want to do so.
This will only affect the way we use information when our reason for doing so is that we have your consent. See the section 'Your Rights' about more generally restricting use of your information.
If you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide certain products or services to you. If this is so, we will tell you.
Here you can find out how to contact us if you think the information we hold for you is wrong, incomplete or out of date.
You have the right to question any information we have about you that you think is incorrect. We’ll take reasonable steps to check this for you and correct it.
If you want to do this you can visit one of our branches or call us on 0345 721 3141 (+44 1313 37 42 18 from outside the UK). Lines are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Calls may be monitored or recorded.
If you have a hearing or speech impairment you can also call us using the Next Generation Text (NGT) service. Simply dial 18001 and then the telephone number.
If you’re Deaf and a BSL user, you can talk to us live through a BSL interpreter online using our BSL SignVideo service.
This section tells you where to write to us to get a copy of your personal information, and how to ask for a digital file you can use yourself or share easily with others. You can do this online or by writing to us.
You can get a copy of all the personal information we hold about you by filling in this form or by writing to us at this address:
Bank of Scotland DSAR
Charlton Place (C42)
Andover
Hampshire
SP10 1RE
When you want to share your data with outside companies
You also have the right to get certain personal information from us as a digital file, so you can keep and use it yourself, and give it to other organisations if you choose to.
If you wish, we will provide it to you in an electronic format that can be easily re-used, or you can ask us to pass it on to other organisations for you.
If you want to do this you can visit one of our branches, or call us on 0345 721 3141 (+44 1313 37 42 18 from outside the UK). Lines are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Calls may be monitored or recorded.
If you have a hearing or speech impairment you can also call us using the Next Generation Text (NGT) service. Simply dial 18001 and then the telephone number.
If you’re Deaf and a BSL user, you can talk to us live through a BSL interpreter online using our BSL SignVideo service.
What if you want us to stop using your personal information? This section explains about your right to object and other data privacy rights you have – as well as how to contact us about them.
You can object to us keeping or using your personal information. This is known as the ‘right to object’.
You can also ask us to delete, remove, or stop using your personal information if there is no need for us to keep it. This is known as the ‘right to erasure’ or the ‘right to be forgotten’.
There may be legal or other official reasons why we need to keep or use your data. But please tell us if you think that we should not be using it.
We may sometimes be able to restrict the use of your data. This means that it can only be used for certain things, such as legal claims or to exercise legal rights.
You can ask us to restrict the use of your personal information if:
If we do restrict your information in this way, we will not use or share it in other ways while it is restricted.
If you want to object to how we use your data, or ask us to delete it or restrict how we use it you can call us on 0345 721 3141 (+44 1313 37 42 18 from outside the UK). Lines are open 24/7. Calls may be monitored or recorded.
If you have a hearing or speech impairment you can also call us using the Next Generation Text (NGT) service. Simply dial 18001 and then the telephone number.
If you’re Deaf and a BSL user, you can talk to us live through a BSL interpreter online using our BSL SignVideo service.
We may share your personal information with outside organisations such as credit card providers, insurers or tax authorities. This is so that we can provide you with products and services, run our business, and obey rules that apply to us. Here we list all the types of organisation that we may share your personal information with.
Lloyds Banking Group
We may share your personal information with other companies in Lloyds Banking Group.
Authorities
This means official bodies that include:
Banking and financial services
Outside companies we work with to provide services to you and to run our business.
This is to do with something called Open Banking, which gives you more freedom and control to use your own banking data. It can make it easier for you or your business to shop around for products like credit cards, savings and current accounts.
Insurers
We share personal information with insurance industry companies to process claims and help reduce fraud. We do that in these ways:
Other services and schemes
These are organisations that we may need to share your personal information with, because of what you can do with the product or service you have with us.
General business
Outside companies we use to help grow and improve our business.
Company mergers and takeovers
We may also share your personal information if the make-up of Lloyds Banking Group changes in the future:
We use marketing to let you know about products, services and offers that you may want from us. This section tells you how we decide what marketing to show or send you. It also explains how we work out what you may be interested in.
We may use your personal information to make decisions about what products, services and offers we think you may be interested in. This is what we mean when we talk about ‘marketing’.
We can only use your personal information to send you marketing messages if we have either your consent or a ‘legitimate interest’. That is when we have a business or commercial reason to use your information. It must not conflict unfairly with your own interests.
The personal information we have for you is made up of what you tell us, and data we collect when you use our services, or from outside organisations we work with. We study this to form a view on what we think you may want or need, or what may be of interest to you. This is how we decide which products, services and offers may be relevant for you.
This is called profiling for marketing purposes. You can contact us at any time and ask us to stop using your personal information this way.
If you allow it, we may show or send you marketing material online (on our own and other websites including social media), in our app, or by email, mobile phone or post.
What you get will depend on marketing choices that you set. You can change these at any time and tell us to stop sending you marketing.
You can also tell us not to collect data while you are using our websites or mobile apps. If you do, you will still see some marketing but it will not be tailored to you. See our Cookies policy for details about how we use this data to improve our websites and mobile apps.
Whatever you choose, you'll still receive statements and other important information such as changes to your existing products and services.
We do not sell the information we have about you to outside organisations.
We may ask you to confirm or update your choices, if you take out any new products or services with us in future. We will also ask you to do this if there are changes in the law, regulation, or the structure of our business.
If you change your mind you can contact us to update your choices at any time.
Here we tell you how we use automated systems to make decisions about you and your money. We also explain the rights you have to challenge decisions made this way.
We sometimes use systems to make automated decisions about you or your business. This helps us to make sure our decisions are quick, fair, efficient and correct, based on what we know. Automated decisions can affect the products, services or features we may offer you now or in the future, or the price that we charge you for them. They are based on personal information that we have or that we are allowed to collect from others.
Here are the types of automated decision we make:
Pricing
We may decide what to charge for some products and services based on what we know. For instance, if you use our online mortgage calculator, it will use the personal financial details you put in to estimate the kind of mortgage we may offer you. If you apply for insurance, we will compare what you tell us with other records to work out how likely you are to make a claim. This will help us decide whether to offer you the product and what price to charge you.
Tailoring products, services, offers and marketing
We may place you in groups with similar customers. These are called customer segments. We use these to study and learn about our customers’ needs, and to make decisions based on what we learn. This helps us to design products, services and offers for different customer segments, and to manage our relationships with them. It also helps us tailor the marketing that individuals receive or are shown on our own and other websites and mobile apps, including social media.
Detecting fraud
We use your personal information to help decide if your personal or business accounts may be being used for fraud or money-laundering. We may detect that an account is being used in ways that fraudsters work. Or we may notice that an account is being used in a way that is unusual for you or your business. If we think there is a risk of fraud, we may stop activity on the accounts or refuse access to them.
Opening accounts
When you open an account with us, we check that the product or service is relevant for you, based on what we know. We also check that you or your business meet the conditions needed to open the account. This may include checking age, residency, nationality or financial position.
Approving credit
We use a system to decide whether to lend money to you or your business, when you apply for credit such as a loan or credit card. This is called credit scoring. It uses past data to assess how you’re likely to act while paying back any money you borrow. This includes data about similar accounts you may have had before.
Credit scoring uses data from three sources:
It gives an overall assessment based on this. Banks and other lenders use this to help us make responsible lending decisions that are fair and informed.
Credit scoring methods are tested regularly to make sure they are fair and unbiased.
Your rights
As a person you have rights over automated decisions.
If you want to know more about these rights, please contact us.
This section explains how we work with outside companies to decide whether to lend you money through products like credit cards or loans. It explains what we do and why we do it.
We carry out credit and identity checks when you apply for a product or services for you or your business. We may use Credit Reference Agencies to help us with this.
If you use our services, from time to time we may also search information that the CRAs have, to help us manage those accounts.
We will share your personal information with CRAs and they will give us information about you. The data we exchange can include:
We’ll use this data to:
We will go on sharing your personal information with CRAs for as long as you are a customer. This will also include details of funds going into the account, and the account balance. If you borrow, it will also include details of your repayments and whether you repay in full and on time. We will also tell the CRAs when you settle your accounts with us. The CRAs may give this information to other organisations that want to check your credit status.
When we ask CRAs about you or your business, they will note it on your credit file. This is called a credit search. Other lenders may see this and we may see credit searches from other lenders.
If you apply for a product with someone else, we will link your records with theirs. We will do the same if you tell us you have a spouse, partner or civil partner – or that you are in business with other partners or directors.
You should tell them about this before you apply for a product or service. It is important that they know your records will be linked together, and that credit searches may be made on them.
CRAs will also link your records together. These links will stay on your files unless one of you asks the CRAs to break the link. You will normally need to give proof that you no longer have a financial link with each other.
You can find out more about the CRAs on their websites, in the Credit Reference Agency Information Notice. This includes details about:
Here are links to the information notice for each of the three main Credit Reference Agencies:
Callcredit
Equifax
Experian
This section deals with information we share outside our group to help fight financial crime. This includes crimes such as fraud, money-laundering and terrorist financing.
We may need to confirm your identity before we provide products or services to you or your business. This may include carrying out fraud checks at the point of sale.
Once you have become a customer of ours, we will share your personal information as needed to help combat fraud and other financial crime. The organisations we share data with are:
Throughout our relationship with you, we and these organisations exchange data between us to help prevent, deter, detect and investigate fraud and money-laundering.
None of us can use your personal information unless we have a proper reason to do so. It must be needed either for us to obey the law, or for a ‘legitimate interest’.
When we have a business or commercial reason of our own to use your information, this is called a ‘legitimate interest’. We will tell you what that is, if we are going to rely on it as the reason for using your data. Even then, it must not unfairly go against your interests.
We will use the information to:
We or an FPA may allow law enforcement agencies to access your personal information. This is to support their duty to prevent, detect, investigate and prosecute crime.
These other organisations can keep personal information for different lengths of time, up to six years.
The information we use
These are some of the kinds of personal information that we use:
Automated decisions for fraud prevention
The information we have for you or your business is made up of what you tell us, and data we collect when you use our services, or from third parties we work with.
We and other organisations acting to prevent fraud may process your personal information in systems that look for fraud by studying patterns in the data. We may find that an account or policy is being used in ways that fraudsters work. Or we may notice that an account is being used in a way that is unusual for you or your business. Either of these could indicate a risk that fraud or money-laundering may be carried out against a customer, the bank or the insurer.
How this can affect you
If we or an FPA decide there is a risk of fraud, we may stop activity on the accounts or block access to them. FPAs and cross-industry organisations may also keep a record of the risk that you or your business may pose.
This may result in other organisations refusing to provide you with products or services, or to employ you.
Data transfers out of the EEA
FPAs and other organisations we share data with for these purposes may send personal information to countries outside the European Economic Area (‘EEA’). When they do, there will be a contract in place to make sure the recipient protects the data to the same standard as the EEA. This may include following international frameworks for making data sharing secure.
This section tells you about the safeguards that keep your personal information safe and private, if it is sent outside the EEA.
We will only send your data outside of the European Economic Area (‘EEA’) to:
If we do transfer your personal information outside the EEA to our suppliers, we will make sure that it is protected to the same extent as in the EEA. We’ll use one of these safeguards: