Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

1.  1. Introduction 

Bear Business Finance Ltd (“we”, “us”, “our”, “Bear”) take data protection very seriously and we are committed to taking care of your business data and any data that may be used to identify individuals’ personal data in the course of operating our Bear Business Finance Ltd service. This Privacy Policy sets out the basis on which we will collect, process, store and disclose personal data as a controller. It includes how we process data in relation to our staff, applicants, customers, suppliers, business partners (introducers and lenders), business contacts and visitors of our site. Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.   

By using our Services, you agree to grant us a royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, license to use your personal data for the purposes and on the basis set out in this Privacy Policy. This policy applies to Bear Business Finance Ltd. If you have any comments in relation to this privacy policy, please email them to operations@bearbusinessfinance.com or by phone: 01832 770273  Here are the details that the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regards to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, known as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) says we have to give you as a ‘data controller’: 

 2. Who We Are    Bear Business Finance Ltd

• Our site address is www.bearbusinessfinance.com & www.bearbusinessfinance.co.uk
• Our company is Bear Business Finance Ltd, registered in England with registration number 01832 770273 and registered address at 4 New Street, Oundle, Peterborough, PE8 4ED.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office ref (ICO):ZB515875

At BEAR you will always get a personal, professional and knowledgeable experience, we understand that any purchase for your business is critical, therefore it is our responsibility to suit your key drivers, with the right solution, utilising our extensive lender panel.

2.  What information we collect 

·        We collect and process the following data about you:   Identity data

• Including name, username or similar identifier.

  Contact data

• Including email address, postal address, residential address and telephone numbers.

  Financial and business data

• Including financial requirements (e.g. how much our customers would like to borrow), business information, bank statements, filed accounts, VAT returns, bank account information, file and payment details; in case of sole traders – other personal financial data relevant to business finance application, such as value of personal pension, value of property equity, county court judgements (personal and business), credit ratings (personal and business).

  Transaction data

• Including details about payments to and from you and other details of products / services you have purchased from us or products / services we have purchased from you.

  Profile data

• Including your username and password, your interests, preferences, feedback and survey responses.

  Usage data

• Including information about how you use our website and products and services that you purchase from us.

  Marketing and communication data

• Including your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties and your communication preferences.

  To keep your personal information up to date, please advise us of any changes by e-mail to operations@bearbusinessfinance.com and as soon as possible after any change in your name, residential address, telephone number, e-mail address and any other such important details.   We do not generally collect any Special Categories of Personal Data about you (this includes details about your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, information about your health, and genetic and biometric data).   Under GDPR we will ensure that your personal data is processed lawfully, fairly, and transparently, without adversely affecting your rights. We will only process your personal data if at least one of the following bases applies: 

1. you have given consent to the processing of your personal data for one or more specific purposes;
2. processing is necessary for the performance of a contract to which you are a party or in order to take steps at the request of you prior to entering into a contract;
3. processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject;
4. processing is necessary to protect the vital interests of you or of another natural person;
5. processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller; and/or
6. processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by us or by a third party such as our credit card payment processing, except where such interests are overridden by the fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data.

  We use different methods to collect data from and about you, including: 

• Direct interactions when you make enquires or we purchase your products or services, you create an account on our site, request marketing to be sent to you, enter a promotion or survey, or give us feedback or contact us.
• Third parties or publicly available sources, including existing or prospective providers of finance to you (in the course of considering whether to make an application or making an application to them), analytics providers such as Google, advertising networks, search information providers,] and identity and contact data from publicly available sources such as Companies House and the Electoral Register based inside the EU.

3.  Cookies   

·        We use various cookies to distinguish users and improve our site.     

How we use what we collect   

We use information about you to: 

• Help make decisions about credit and credit related services
• Provide partner and event information
• Retargeting purposes
• Improve our service
• Trade debtors, recover debt, prevent fraud, and to manage your accounts
• Prevent fraud and money laundering
• Present our site content effectively to you.
• Provide information and products and services that you request, or (with soft opt-in following your purchase, your consent or if we have another lawful basis, such as legitimate interest) which we think may interest you.
• Carry out our contracts with you.
• Tell you, our charges.

  If you are a sole trader, you acknowledge that credit reference agencies link together the records of you and anyone that you have advised is a financial associate (joint credit account). Links between financial associates will remain on your, and their, credit reference files until such time as you or your partner successfully files for a disassociation with the credit reference agencies. When assessing the affordability of your repayments, we may consider information about your financial associates in your credit reference.   If you are already our customer, we will only contact you electronically about things like what was previously provided to or of interest to you and you will be given an opportunity to opt-out and unsubscribe from further communications.   Please note: We don’t identify individuals to our advertisers, but we do give them aggregate information to help them reach their target audience, and we may use information we have collected to display advertisements to that audience.   If you don’t want us to use your personal data for any of the reasons set out in this section, you can let us know at any time by contacting us at operations@bearbusinessfinance.com or by phone: 01832 7702730, and we will delete your data from our systems. However, you acknowledge this may limit our ability to provide our products and services to you.   In some cases, the collection of personal data may be a statutory or contractual requirement, and we will be limited in the products and services we can provide you if you don’t provide your personal data in these cases.   

5. Where we store your data 

  We store your personal data on our own service databases as well as selected third party providers, including Hubspot servers. This is used by the Icaruss service which sends customers emails and tracks the status of applications. We may transfer your collected data outside the European Economic Area (EEA). It may be processed outside the EEA as may be necessary to provide our products and services to you, to provide our service to you, or if we have your consent.   By giving us your personal data, you agree to this arrangement. We will do what we reasonably can to keep your data secure.   If we give, or you create a password, you must keep it confidential. Please don’t share it. Although we try to provide protection, we cannot guarantee complete security for your data, and you take the risk that any sending of that data turns out to be not secure despite our efforts. We only keep your personal data for as long as we need to in order to use it as described above in section 3, and/or for as long as we have your permission to keep it. Our general retention period is 7 years but your data may be kept for shorter or longer periods of time, in accordance with our internal Data Retention Policy and applicable legislation. In any event, we will conduct regular reviews to ascertain whether we need to keep your personal data. Your personal data will be deleted if we no longer need it.   

7.  Disclosing your information   

We are allowed to disclose your information in the following cases: 

• If we want to sell our business, we can disclose it to the potential buyer.
• We can disclose it if we have a legal obligation to do so, or in order to protect other people’s property, safety or rights.
• We can exchange information with others to protect against fraud or credit risks.
•  

  We will also check your details with a fraud prevention agency or agencies and if you give false or inaccurate information and we identify fraud, this will be recorded and may be shared by those agencies with other organisations and us, so that we and other organisations, including law enforcement agencies and debt collection agencies may access, use and search these records as described in section3.   With your permission we will share your personal data with suitable lenders for the purpose of loan underwriting.   Where any of your data is required for such a purpose, we will take all reasonable steps to ensure that your data will be handled safely, securely, and in accordance with your rights, our obligations, and the obligations of the third party under GDPR and the law.   

8.  Applicants   

 In completing our job application form, submitting your CV or applying by LinkedIn or employment events, you will give us personal information about yourself. We will use your personal data only for the purpose of assessing your suitability for employment by us and in any subsequent interviewing process. Copies of the information you submit, and any further correspondence will be retained to progress your job application and as a record of our employment and fair access processes. Your application will only be processed by our People team. The information you provide to us will be stored and processed for internal recruitment purposes only. We may store and record any telephone calls you have with staff for record keeping and quality control purposes. We will retain your information in the event of an unsuccessful application for a period of 12 months, in line with GDPR. After this period the data will be anonymised.   

8. Your rights 

You can ask us not to use your data for marketing. You can do this by ticking the relevant boxes on our forms, clicking the unsubscribe link contained in our marketing communications or by contacting us at any time at operations@bearbusinessfinance.com or by phone: 01832 77027300.   Under the GDPR, you also have the right to: 

• request access to, deletion of or correction of your personal data held by us at no cost to you;
• request that your personal data be transferred to another person (data portability);
• be informed of what data processing is taking place;
• restrict processing;
• to object to processing of your personal data; and
• complain to a supervisory authority.

  You also have rights with respect to automated decision-making and profiling.   To enforce any of the foregoing rights or if you have any other questions about our site or this Privacy Policy, please contact us at operations@bearbusinessfinance.com or by phone:01832 770273000.   We may ask for further identification or confirmation via email. We will aim to respond to all requests within a 30 day period but if the request is complex we may have to extend this to a 90 day period. We shall notify you within the 30 day period if this is the case. In some cases, the deletion of your data may contravene with our requirements under other regulations, we shall inform you of such if this is the case. Where we have good reason, and if the GDPR permits, we can refuse your request for a copy of your information, or certain elements of the request. If we refuse your request or any element of it, we will provide you with our reasons for doing so. 

9.  Links to other sites 

Please note that our terms and conditions and our policies will not apply to other websites that you get to via a link from our site. We have no control over how your data is collected, stored or used by other websites and we advise you to check the privacy policies of any such websites before providing any data to them. 

10.              Automated Decision-Making and Profiling 

We do not undertake any automated decision-making, including profiling.   

11. Complaints

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact us to have the matter investigated.  Email – operations@bearbusinessfinance.com Phone – 01832 7702730 If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are processing your personal data not in accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office https://ico.org.uk

11.1 Notice to Staff

All staff have an obligation to read and adhere to all relevant Bear Business Finance Ltd Policies. During the onboarding process e-learning will be assigned and completion is a requirement. Personal information held about staff will be stored securely and will only be accessible by authorised departments. All Bear hardware and software is the property of Bear Business Finance Ltd. When leaving employment from Bear all staff are required to return all hardware. If staff use the facilities for personal use, they understand that Bear has the right to access the hardware and software at any time without notice. If communications are of a personal nature staff should clearly subject the content as personal. However, Bear will still have the right to access these if needed. 

12. Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Notice from time to time. This may be necessary, for example, if the law changes, or if we change our business in a way that affects personal data protection. Any changes will be immediately posted on our site and you will be deemed to have accepted the terms of the Privacy Policy on your first use of our site following the alterations. We recommend that you check this page regularly to keep up-to-date. This Privacy Policy was last updated on 1^st March 2023.