Privacy Policy

Bizzloans is a business finance comparison and broking service. The data controller responsible for your personal data is Bizzloans Ltd, company number , of Kemp House, 160 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX. We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) under registration number .

We are not a lender. We do not lend money and we do not assess or approve applications. Our role is to take what you tell us about your business, match it against the lenders on our panel, and pass your details to the lenders you agree to be referred to. Each lender is a separate data controller with its own privacy notice, and once your information is with them, their notice governs how they handle it.

You can contact us about anything in this policy by emailing support@bizzloans.com.au (please mark it for the attention of our data protection lead), or by writing to the address above.

We collect only what we need to compare finance for you. That usually means:

• Contact details: your name, business email address, phone number, and the area or postcode you trade in.
• Business details: trading and registered business name, Companies House number where you have one, entity type (limited company, sole trader, partnership or LLP), industry, how long you have been trading, and where the business operates.
• Financial details: turnover, the amount and purpose of the finance you want, existing business debts and repayments, assets offered as security, and, where a lender requires it, bank statements, VAT returns, tax returns or financial statements.
• Identity and credit information: see section 5.
• Website information: your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you visit, and the campaign or referral source that brought you here. Our cookie policy explains this in more detail.

We do not ask for, and do not want, your online banking passwords. We do not deliberately collect special category data as UK GDPR defines it, such as health, racial or ethnic origin, political opinions or religious beliefs. If you send us something like that unprompted, we will not use it, and we will delete it unless we are required by law to keep it.

Where you give us information about someone else, such as a co-director, a guarantor or a partner, you must have their permission to do so, and you should show them this policy.

UK GDPR requires us to have a lawful basis for each way we use your personal data. We rely on the following:

• Taking steps at your request before entering into a contract, and performing our agreement with you: working out which lenders are likely to consider your business, preparing and submitting your application to the lenders you choose, and keeping you updated while a lender assesses you.
• Legal obligation: meeting our obligations under UK law, including anti-money laundering, fraud prevention and record-keeping requirements, and responding to lawful requests from regulators, courts and law enforcement.
• Legitimate interests: verifying your identity and business details (for example against Companies House), preventing fraud, improving our website and service, understanding which pages and campaigns are useful, and handling complaints. We only rely on this where our interests are not overridden by your rights.
• Consent: sending you electronic marketing where the law requires consent (see section 8), and setting non-essential cookies (see our cookie policy). You can withdraw consent at any time.

You do not have to give us your information. But if you want us to actually compare finance for you, we need the details above. Without them we cannot match you to a lender, and no lender will assess you.

Most of the time we collect information directly from you: through the forms and calculator on this site, by phone, by email, or in person. We also collect it from your accountant or bookkeeper where you have asked them to deal with us.

We may also collect information about you from lenders on our panel (for example, the outcome of an application), from public registers such as Companies House, from credit reference agencies where section 5 applies, from identity verification and fraud prevention services, and from referral partners who have your permission to pass your details to us.

To assess an application, the lenders we introduce you to, and where applicable we, may search your personal and business credit files with one or more of the UK credit reference agencies (CRAs): Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Some searches are “soft” searches, which are visible only to you and do not affect your credit score. Where a lender proceeds to full assessment it may carry out a “hard” search, which is recorded on your credit file and can be seen by other lenders.

CRAs may also be used to verify your identity, prevent fraud and money laundering, and trace your whereabouts. If you are applying with another person, such as a fellow director or partner, a financial association may be created between your credit files.

The three CRAs have published a joint notice, the Credit Reference Agency Information Notice (CRAIN), which explains how they use and share personal data, their lawful bases, retention periods and your rights. You can read it at experian.co.uk/crain.

We share your information with:

• Lenders on our panel: this is the main one, and it is the whole point of the service. We only send your details to lenders you have agreed we can approach, and only so they can assess whether they can help you. We do not send your details to every lender on the panel by default.
• Other brokers and introducers: where a lender is only accessible through another intermediary, or where your matter is better handled by a specialist we work with, and you have agreed to that referral.
• Our service providers: the businesses that run our website hosting, customer relationship management, telephony, email, e-signature, open banking, identity verification and analytics tools. They act as our processors and may only use your information to provide those services to us.
• Credit reference and fraud prevention agencies: as described in section 5.
• Your professional advisors: your accountant, bookkeeper or solicitor, where you have asked us to deal with them.
• Courts, regulators and law enforcement: where we are required or permitted by law to disclose it.

We do not sell your personal data and we do not supply it to unrelated third parties for their own marketing.

The Bizzloans brand also operates in Australia and New Zealand. Some of our support team are based in the Philippines, and some of the systems we use, including our customer relationship management platform, are operated from Australia. Some of the software we rely on, such as cloud hosting, email and analytics, is supplied by global providers that may store or back up data in other countries, including the United States and the European Economic Area.

This means your personal data may be transferred to, and accessed from, countries outside the UK. Where a country does not have UK adequacy regulations, we put appropriate safeguards in place before the transfer, such as the ICO’s International Data Transfer Agreement (IDTA) or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, together with access controls and confidentiality obligations on the people who handle your data. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards and the countries involved.

If you have enquired with us, we may send you emails, SMS or calls about business finance products, rate changes and guides we think are relevant to you. We do this in line with UK GDPR and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003(PECR), which means relying on your consent, or on the “soft opt-in” where you have enquired about similar services and were given the chance to opt out.

You can stop it at any time. Use the unsubscribe link in any email, reply STOP to any SMS, tell whoever calls you, or email us at support@bizzloans.com.au. We will action the request promptly and at no cost to you. Opting out of marketing does not stop us contacting you about a finance application that is in progress.

We do not use information from credit reference agencies for marketing.

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data from misuse, loss, and unauthorised access, alteration or disclosure. In practice that means encrypted connections to this website, access controls so that staff only see what they need to do their job, reputable hosting and CRM providers, and secure disposal of records we no longer need.

No system is perfect, and email in particular is not a secure channel. Please do not send us bank statements or identity documents by ordinary email if we have given you a secure upload link instead.

If we suffer a personal data breach that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will report it to the ICO within 72 hours where required, and where the risk is high we will tell you without undue delay.

We keep your information only as long as we need it, or as long as the law requires, whichever is longer. As a guide:

• Enquiries that go nowhere: kept for up to 2 years, then deleted or anonymised.
• Applications and completed loans: kept for at least 5 years after our relationship with you ends, which is the minimum the UK anti-money laundering regulations require, and longer where we need it to deal with a claim or complaint.
• Marketing contact details: kept until you opt out, plus a suppression record so we can honour that opt-out.

When we no longer need information and no law requires us to keep it, we delete it or anonymise it.

Under UK GDPR you have the right to:

• be informed about how we use your personal data (this policy);
• access the personal data we hold about you;
• have inaccurate or incomplete data corrected;
• have your data erased in certain circumstances;
• restrict how we use your data in certain circumstances;
• object to processing based on legitimate interests, and to direct marketing at any time;
• data portability, where processing is based on consent or contract and carried out by automated means;
• not be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing that has legal or similarly significant effects on you (we do not make such decisions; lenders may, and their privacy notices will explain this); and
• withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent.

To exercise any of these rights, email support@bizzloans.com.au. We may need to confirm your identity first, because we will not hand personal data to the wrong person. There is normally no charge, and we will respond within one month (extendable by up to two further months for complex requests, in which case we will tell you why). If we have already passed information to a lender and we then correct or erase it, we will tell that lender where it is reasonable to do so.

If you think we have mishandled your information, tell us first. Most things are sorted out quickly once someone actually looks at them.

• Email support@bizzloans.com.au, marked for the attention of our data protection lead; or
• use the complaints option on our contact page.

We will acknowledge your complaint within 5 business days, tell you who is handling it, and give you a written answer within one month. If we need longer, we will tell you why and keep you posted.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection. Its service is free.

• Online: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint
• Phone: 0303 123 1113

For a complaint about what is recorded on your credit file, you can also contact the credit reference agency concerned.

We may update this policy. The version published on this page is the one that applies, and the date at the top tells you when it last changed. If we make a change that materially affects how we handle your information, we will make that clear rather than quietly swapping the page.

You can ask for a copy of this policy in another format, printed or plain text, and we will provide it free of charge.