Privacy

At Salford Credit Union we are committed to protecting our members’ privacy. The Credit Union requires any information marked as mandatory for membership to either meet legal obligations or enable us to perform our contract with you. Where you are not able to provide us with this information, we may not be able to open an account for you. Where we request further information about you not required for these reasons, we will ask for your consent.

You can download our full Privacy Notice here:

Privacy during a loan application

In order to process your application we will supply some of your personal information to TransUnion International UK Limited, Transunion are a credit reference agency providing services such as credit risk and affordability checking, fraud prevention, anti-money laundering, identity verification and tracing.

TransUnion will use your personal information to provide services to us and its other clients. We use their services in order to assess your creditworthiness and product suitability, check your identity, trace and recover debts and prevent criminal activity such as fraud and money laundering. More information about TransUnion and the ways in which it uses and shares personal information can be found in its privacy notice at https://www.transunion.co.uk/legal-information/bureau-privacy-notice.

As we supply data to TransUnion International UK Limited, please find their Credit Reference Agency Information Notice below

We (Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, collectively referred to as “we” and “us” throughout this privacy notice) are credit reference agencies and we play an important role in the UK’s financial ecosystem. This Credit Reference Agency Information Notice (referred to as “this privacy notice”) explains how we collect, process and share personal data about consumers and businesses (referred to as “you”).

This section briefly summarises the key processing activities common to all of us. For more detail, please refer to the rest of this document. We recommend reviewing each credit reference agency’s own privacy notices, which explain the specific processing activities of that credit reference agency. Links to these documents can be found in Section 14.

Throughout this privacy notice, where we use “data” we mean the data types as described in Section 4.

What do credit reference agencies do?

• We collect information about you from various sources and build databases that hold this data.
• We need to hold relevant permissions from the Financial Conduct Authority to collect and share this financial information about you.

Where do credit reference agencies get information from?

• The primary source of information we collect is from public records, such as court judgments (CCJs) and electoral register information, financial information from financial account providers, and information generated by us based on the information received and/or our own analytical research.
• In addition, we may also collect information from payment accounts via the use of open banking, gambling organisations, employers, utilities suppliers, telecoms businesses as well as (business data only) from publicly available business websites.

Who uses the information, and what do they use it for?

• Financial account providers and other organisations carry out searches against information with one or more of us.
• Organisations can carry out searches for several reasons. These include assessing creditworthiness and ability to afford financial products, checking the accuracy of other information, preventing and detecting crime (such as fraud or money laundering), checking identity, locating individuals (for example to recover debts that they owe), calculating how much their insurance premiums should be, employment verification, including assessing their suitability for a job or a tenancy, and helping to protect individuals from the impacts of problem gambling.
• When an organisation carries out a search of someone’s data, we will record details of that search. This is known as a search footprint. Depending on the type of search they can be visible to the individual and/or to other organisations that may conduct searches on that individual. Some organisations may draw adverse inference from the presence of some search footprints, for example if a person has multiple debt collection searches recorded.
• We link people who appear to be financially associated, for example, through a joint account, joint application for credit or a joint County Court Judgment. This information on financial associates may be checked by companies when undertaking credit searches for the purposes of assessing credit risk. This is because your link with financial associates may affect your ability to repay debt. Examples of this include, acting as guarantor for a personal loan that another individual is taking out, or in the capacity as a director or business owner, where the relevant business is applying for a commercial loan. See the table in Section 4for further information on how the financial associate’s data affects your credit report and score.
• We also use some data for marketing-related purposes. Each of us provide different marketing services, to help organisations to better direct their marketing to consumers and (where relevant) business owners and directors, for example excluding individuals from advertising for credit products they would not be eligible for. We may also use the data to predict information or characteristics about the population, to inform product and marketing strategy, to help organisations identify who they want to market their products and services to, and how they should be delivered.
• The data relating to you held by each of us might be different. This is because not every financial account provider supplies data to every one of us.

What else do credit reference agencies do with my information?

• We also use the data in our databases for other activities, including analytics and profiling. This can help financial account providers build scorecards to use in assessing credit applications.
• We carry out several types of data processing to help achieve the aims described above. These include loading data, matching and linking data together, generating credit scores, as well as testing, developing and building products and services for our clients.
• Individuals have certain rights that they can exercise in relation to the personal data held by us. For example, they have the right to obtain a copy of the data, to ask us to correct it if it is inaccurate, and to object to the processing of the data. The ICO’s websiteprovides more details on the available rights and details of how these rights can be exercised are set out in Sections 9, 10, 11and 12below. Personal data about individuals in their role as owners, directors, and employees of UK businesses may also be obtained, processed and shared by commercial data sharing credit reference agencies not referenced in this privacy notice. For further information please refer to the Business Information Providers Association’s website.

Please note

• If you are looking for information about the role that data plays in lending decisions made by financial account providers, you may wish to consult Understanding your credit information and how lenders use it. This is published on the website of each of us, Equifax, Experianand TransUnion.
• This document describes our common processing activities detailing how we use and distribute the data described in Section 4.
• We are independent businesses. Not all of the products and services described in this document are provided by all three of us, or in the same way, and not all of the data is used by each of us.
• This document does not cover all personal data that we use and distribute; for example, this document does not cover processing of personal data in relation to our services you sign up to directly, such as services which allow you to view your own credit report and score.
• Each of us offers other products and services (including marketing services) not covered by this privacy notice.Section 14provides links to our own privacy notice(s) which outline other uses of data not fully described here that may be unique to one of us or includes additional detail about our core activities processing. The same links about our core processing activities are shown here below:

• • Experian | Data Privacy
  • Experian | Marketing Transparency Notice | Business Information Experian UK
  • Equifax | Privacy Hub | UK
  • TransUnion | Privacy Centre

Our commitment to privacy in relation to use of this website

Salford Credit Union is displaying this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for this website: salfordcreditunion.com

We use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server, and to administer our Web site. Your IP address is used to help identify you and gather broad demographic information.

In a few areas of the Salford Credit Union website we ask you to provide information that will enable us to use the information to keep you informed of our latest products and services after your visit to the salfordcreditunion.com website. The personal information that you supply to Salford Credit Union enables us to personalise and improve your web browsing experience. It gives us a greater understanding of you, so that we can recommend services and promotions that we feel would be of interest to you. It is completely optional for you to participate. We request information from you when you:

• Subscribe to the newsletter service
• Participate in a competition
• Make an online enquiry
• Submit feedback

Our site’s enquiry forms ask for your name, email address, and where appropriate other personal information that would be needed to register for or subscribe to our services. In the case of newsletters or mailing lists you will be able to remove your name from these lists at any time.

The information you provide will only be used to support and improve your customer relationship with Salford Credit Union, and we guarantee that we will never pass on any of your personal information to a third party without your express permission.

When you visit salfordcreditunion.com, you can surf the site anonymously and access important information without revealing your identity. In order to improve our site, we use “cookies” to track your visit. A cookie is a small text file, which is stored within your web browser and identifies your computer to our server. They also enable us to record how often you visit the site and the areas you navigate within it. It functions as your identification card, recording your passwords and preferences. It cannot be executed as code or deliver viruses.

While Salford Credit Union uses cookies to track your visit to salfordcreditunion.com, and our Web servers automatically log the IP/Internet address of your computer, this information does not identify you personally and you remain anonymous unless you have otherwise provided Salford Credit Union with personal information.

If you have any questions about our terms of use, privacy statement, the practices of this site, or your dealings with this web site, you can contact us on 0161 686 5880.