This privacy policy sets out how we handle and manage your information in compliance with our requirements under the Privacy Act 1988, Australian Privacy Principles and any related privacy codes. More specifically, this policy details how we collect, use, disclose, and hold your information and how you can access and correct this. This policy also contains the details by which you can make a complaint about any perceived breach of the Australian Privacy Principles.

For the purposes of this policy and as defined by the Privacy Act 1988, personal information is information or an opinion about an identified, or an easily identifiable, person. This includes information that may be true or not and includes information recorded or held in any form. Throughout this policy, the terms ‘personal information’ and ‘information’ may be used interchangeably.

In the course of conducting our business functions and activities, we may collect and hold personal information about you such as:

We will not generally collect or hold sensitive information, unless you have consented to this and the information is reasonably necessary in order for us to provide one of our products or services. Sensitive information is personal information regarding:

If you should choose not to provide the information we require, we may be unable to provide you with some or all of our services.

We collect, hold, use and disclose information that is reasonably required to offer and provide our financial services, and to complete the day to day activates involved with this, such as:

We will aim to collect information directly from you in the most practical way possible. This will primarily be through online forms, email, verbally over the phone and online chat facilities. Where it is not practical to collect information from you, we may, where you have consented, collect information from external third parties such as:

We may also collect information purchased from external companies to offer you products, where your consent was given to those external companies to do so.

We may collect and hold website data if you have visited our website, such as your IP address, your internet service provider, the type of browser you used and the time and date of your visit. Anonymous information such as previous pages visited may also be collected to improve advertising effectiveness. For more information, view our Website Terms of Use Policy.

We may also send you “cookies” to help identify you when dealing with us online. We may send you cookies from our marketing partners Bloomreach and Exponea. A cookie is a small text file that a website may place on your computer or mobile device to remember your preferences and actions you take on our website. The use of cookies may enable us to identify you and the pages you access and the prior site you visited. You can set your web browser to refuse cookies, however this may mean that you are unable to use the full functionality of our websites and services.

We also use online advertising tools such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Advertising, Exponea and Bloomreach. These may include Remarketing, Google Display Network Impression Reporting, DoubleClick Platform integrations and Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting. Like cookies, these tools collect data about how you interact with our websites. These tools mean that third-party vendors, including Google and Facebook, use cookies to collect such data and show our ads on sites across the Internet. You can find out more about how Google uses such data and how you can control information sent to Google at www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners. Information about how you can opt out of Google Analytics can be found at https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout. Information about how Facebook uses your data can be found at https://www.facebook.com/policy.php.

We may collect and hold details of our communications with you such as details of phone calls, emails you may have sent us, transcripts from our online chat services and written communications you send us by post.

Any personal information we collect will be held in a secure electronic form. We use both our own secure independent software and trusted external cloud based services and storage solutions to hold your information. To protect your information, we use a combination of security measures such as monitoring our external service providers, continuously improving our own internal software and developing and implementing internal processes. We may hold your information for as long as we need to continue to offer a particular service, or for a period specified by law. As we use several cloud-based services, some of your information may be stored overseas.

We will not disclose your information to anyone unless:

Depending on the particular circumstances, we may disclose your information to:personal next of kin contacts.business referees, such as employers and business partners.debt collection agencies.other credit providers and financial institutions.Credit reporting bodies.our financiers, insurers and auditors.our contractors, agents or service providers we use to offer our services, including payment system providers.any person who is acting on your behalf, such as authorised third parties, powers of attorney, guardians, financial councillors or advisors, solicitors and administrators.government regulators such as ASIC.Australian Taxation Office, Centrelink and other government departments.Australian law enforcement bodies and courts/tribunals.any other entity, such as credit providers or lead service providers, who we may sell your personal information to for a fee, for the purposes of offering you their products or services oron-selling your information for the same purposes as it was sold to them.any other persons or entities who you have consented to.any other persons or entities made reference to in this policy.

We will not disclose your information to entities that do not have an Australian link.

Equifax Advantage Information Services and Solutions Limited

Illion (formerly Dunn & Bradstreet

We may also disclose some of your personal information to a credit reporting body for the purpose of verifying your identity, where you have given your consent to do so. The information we will disclose for this purpose includes details such as your name, date of birth, address and drivers license details, which the credit reporting body will attempt to match against information held by them. Upon our request, the credit reporting body may also prepare an assessment about whether the disclosed information, as outlined above, match’s personal information held by them. If this check does not produce a match, you will have the opportunity to provide further documentation to verify your identity. The details of the credit reporting body that we conduct these checks with are as follows:

Veda Advantage Information Services and Solutions Limited

We may use your personal information that we collect to contact you about our products and services from time to time. We may also purchase information for the use of promotional activities where consent has been given for this.

We may also use your information to promote and market products and/or services provided by us or our associated entities that we believe will be of interest and/or benefit to you, and to provide to other entities so that they may promote and market products and/or services to you that we believe will be of interest and/or benefit to you. We may also share customer data with third parties, for example advertising networks/search engines, to perform marketing services on our behalf.

If you do not wish to be contacted for this purpose, you can opt out of these services at any time by contacting us at the contact details listed in the ‘Contact Us’ section of this document.

If you would like to access information we hold about you, you can contact us on the details listed in this documents ‘Contact Us’ section. Although you do have a right to access information we hold about you, there are some exceptions, and as such requests will be subject to some consideration. We will endeavour to respond to these requests as soon as practically possible after they are made and if we are for any reason unable to comply with your request, we will notify you of this.

You can request that we correct information that we hold about you. If we are satisfied that the information is inaccurate, out-of-date or incomplete, we will correct it as soon as practically possible, and always within 30 days from the date the request is made. To make such a request, you can contact us on the details in the ‘Contact Us’ section of this document. We will not charge a fee for the correction of information.

If you believe there has been a breach of the Australian Privacy principles or any relevant privacy codes, we would encourage you to contact us on our general contact details listed in this documents ‘Contact Us’ section. Most complaints are common misunderstandings, and a simple conversation will usually resolve the issue.

If we are unable to resolve your complaint with our internal processes, you may refer it to our external dispute resolution scheme or to the office of the Australian information Commissioner. You can contact these bodies at:

Credit and Investments Ombudsman Ltd

Privacy Commissioner

If you would like more detail on dispute resolution processes, please see our Dispute Resolution Statement

If you have any questions with regard to this privacy policy, or would like to know more about our management and use of information, you can contact us at:

Email: hello@friendlyfinance.com.au

Website: www.friendlyfinance.com.au

We will endeavour to respond to any queries or requests as soon as practically possible.