(How information about you will be used)
This Privacy Notice (the “Privacy Notice”) relates to Academy Insurance Services Ltd (“we” or “us”) and any of our trading names whose registered office is at Academy Insurance, Davidson House, Forbury Square, Reading, RG1 3EU. A copy can be found on our Website at www.academyinsurance.co.uk.
We are insurance brokers and offer different types of insurance products. This privacy notice relates to Car, Van, Motorcycle, Home, Travel and Commercial insurance.
The privacy and security of your personal data is important to us. Your information will be properly managed and protected at all times. Please read this Privacy Notice carefully as it contains important information on:
Academy Insurance Services Ltd is a data controller for the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation, 2018 (“Data Protection Laws”). We are responsible for, and control the processing of, personal information which we hold about you.
In order to provide services to you, we collect and process personal information about you including - but not limited to – your name, contact information, address information including post code, family details, health and personal circumstances, financial details and credit history, employment details and any criminal convictions. We may hold some of this information already and will update it periodically when new policies are taken out, existing policies amended, or policies fall due for renewal. You have an ongoing duty to inform us of any changes in information or circumstances that may prevent us from legitimately continuing to transact insurance or communicate with you.
Payment card information you provide when paying for your policy is processed via our secure systems and used solely for the purpose of that transaction. We do not store payment card information on any of our systems.
When you ask us to arrange insurance for you where this involves providing information relating to children, you confirm that you are the responsible guardian for that child.
Please note that if we do not hold your personal information then we will not be able to offer services to you.
We may receive information about you from third parties including Insurance companies, loss adjusters, finance providers and other data bases for the purposes of reducing fraud and financial crime, provided such third parties have lawful bases on which to share your personal data with us; which we will add to the information we already hold about you where it is relevant to the services we provide to you.
The processing of data is necessary for the arranging, underwriting, and administration of insurance policies and insurance policy claims, provided the Data Controller shall implement suitable and specific measures to safeguard the data subject’s rights and freedoms in respect of such processing.
Information about you will be treated as private and confidential and may be used in the normal course of arranging and administering your insurance. We may also use your data to inform you of relevant information relating to existing insurance policies or any finance arrangements you may have with us in connection with your insurance.
We may from time to time process your personal data to inform you about similar products and services that may be of interest to you. This is because we value your custom and pride ourselves in offering professional and tailored advice to meet specific insurance needs. This includes keeping you informed on the latest insurance and industry information and details of any offers or promotions relating to the insurance services we provide to you.
Our preferred methods of contact are by telephone, email, SMS text message and post.
You can stop us contacting you about products and services at any time by:
Although unsubscribing will mean we stop all communications promoting products or services, we will of course continue to send you service related communications where necessary.
We are relying upon legitimate interests to process your personal data:
Some of our decisions may be made automatically by a system or computer reviewing your personal information. This means the decision is calculated using certain automatic processes rather than being made by one of our employees and is known as ‘automated decision-making’.
Our assessment of your insurance application will involve an automated decision to determine whether we are able to provide a quotation (and if so at what price). The decision involves the use of systems which apply our pricing and business acceptance rules. These systems rely on the information you provide to us about yourself and about other relevant individuals. They use this information to automatically determine whether we are able to provide a quotation and, if so, the price and terms we are willing to offer you.
This assessment involves the use of information obtained from third party companies known as credit reference agencies. The assessment includes the use of information such as verification of residence at the address provided, historic payment records on financial products, prior insolvency and any relevant past county court judgements. The outcome of the assessment may result in us varying our offered payment method or we may decline to offer you a quote.
You have a right to not be subjected to automated decision-making, however you should be aware that if you object to us making an automated decision that is necessary for us to offer you cover or determine your insurance premium, then we may be unable to provide you with an insurance quotation or renewal.
We will also ask you when you purchase your policy if you would like to opt in to automatic renewal. Even if you select “agree”, it is important that you know that you have the right to opt out of this automatic renewal at a later date.
We will only communicate with policyholders or their appointed representatives as notified to us by the policyholder themselves. This means that to protect your privacy confidentiality, should you wish someone to act on your behalf you will need to have made prior arrangements with us.
We may share information we hold about you with Insurers and other statutory, regulatory and law enforcement bodies for the prevention of fraud, financial crime, or where the law requires us to do so.
As part of the service we provide, we may share your personal information with our software providers, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Insurers and other insurance intermediaries, risk management assessors, uninsured loss recovery agents, debt recovery agents, Motor Insurance Bureau (MIB), card payment providers, and other third parties involved either directly or indirectly in your insurance.
We may also pass information about you to credit reference agencies and premium finance providers to assess your financial standing generally and, in particular, where you have requested a premium instalment plan.
We and other organisations may use credit or insurance reference and fraud prevention agency records about you and people financially linked to you, as well as others within your household, to help make decisions about you for underwriting purposes, validating claims and satisfying anti-money-laundering requirements. Upon request, we will tell you which credit reference and fraud prevention agencies we have used so you can obtain a copy of your details from them. Your data may be shared with third parties we use to recover monies you owe us.
To assess applications we send your personal information to a credit reference agency and they provide us with information about you which is relevant to that application. We do this for a number of reasons including affordability, product suitability, and creditworthiness. We also use this to verify your identity and, where applicable, as part of the recovery of debt. This is what is commonly referred to as a “credit check”. This check may be recorded on your credit reference file but leaves only a “soft footprint” and does not affect your ability to apply for creditor other financial products.
We will continue to exchange relevant information with credit reference agencies on an ongoing basis. Credit reference agencies will share your information with other organisations for similar purposes.
You should be aware that if you take out a product using credit, failing to make agreed payments may affect your credit history and can affect future applications you make for credit.
We will not forward your personal information to third parties without your consent unless required by law to do so.
Your data will be kept for as long as it is needed for us to arrange, place and administer your insurance in accordance with our Data Retention Policy, together with any legal and regulatory requirements. This means that we will retain your data whilst any insurance policy arranged through us remains valid, and for as long as is reasonable in order to deal with any claims or other outstanding insurance or finance related matters.
We may monitor and record communications with you (including telephone calls and emails) for the purpose of quality assurance, training and compliance with the relevant regulations.
We will use technical and organisational measures to safeguard your personal data:
The UK has implemented rigorous standards of data protection designed to keep your personal information safe. Whenever possible we will seek to keep your personal information within the UK. If we do need to transfer, store or use the personal information we hold about you outside of the UK, we will either verify that the location your information is being processed in is one the UK Government has determined to match the UK’s own safeguards (known as “adequacy”), or we will put in place such additional protections as are required to make sure it remains suitably secure. This means your information should keep a similar level of protection at all times.
Transfers outside of the UK may be completed by us or by our third party partners and suppliers. We include requirements necessary to protect personal data in the contracts we agree with third parties and periodically assess and review the arrangements that those third parties have in place, to make sure their information security measures are maintained in line with the requirements of data protection law and industry best practice.
Although we will use all reasonable efforts to safeguard your personal data, you acknowledge that use of the internet is not entirely secure and for this reason we cannot guarantee the security of integrity of any personal data that is transferred from you, or to you, via the internet. Should you have any particular concerns about your data, please contact us.
As a data subject, you have the following rights under the Data Protection Laws:
We aim to respond to all valid requests within one month. We may take longer to respond if your request is particularly complex or it relates to a particularly large volume of information. If we believe your request is likely to take over one month we will make you aware of this.
You may ask to see what personal data we hold about you and be provided with:
You have the right to access a copy of the personal information we hold about you and certain details of how we use it. There will not usually be a charge for dealing with these requests, although we may charge a reasonable fee to cover our administrative costs if:
See the ‘Contact us’ for details of who to contact to make a request for your personal data. To help us find the information easily, please provide as much information as possible about the type of information you would like to see.
If, to comply with your request, we would have to disclose information relating to or identifying another person, we may need to obtain the consent of that person if possible. If we cannot obtain consent, we may need to withhold that information or edit the data to remove the identity of that person if possible.
There are certain types of data, which we are not obliged to disclose to you, which include personal data which records our intentions in relation to any negotiations with you where disclosure would be likely to prejudice those negotiations
You can ask us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold. If you would like to do this please:
In accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations 2018 you may request that we stop processing your personal data temporarily if:
In accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations 2018 you can ask us to erase your personal data where:
You should also be aware that we may not be able to agree to a request to exercise a right (for example when your request would negatively impact another individual, or the law requires that we do not). Should this be the case we will inform you of our decision and the reasoning behind our decision.
We are registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office; our ICO Registration number is Z6013888.
If you do not think that we have processed your data in accordance with this notice, please contact us in the first instance to discuss your concerns. If we cannot resolve your complaint to your satisfaction, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, who are the supervisory authority in the UK protecting the rights of individuals under current data protection regulations. Further information is available by calling 0303 123 1113 or visiting www.ico.org.uk
For questions regarding your personal information held by us, or if you wish to request a copy of the information we hold about you, please email or write to us at
Mr Richard Beaven
Academy Insurance
Davidson House
Forbury Square
Reading
RG1 3EU
Email: dpo@academyinsurance.co.uk
Tel: Academy 0118984 1441
We keep our Privacy Notice under review and may make amendments from time to time to reflect important changes affecting how we use your personal information or how we are required to communicate its use to you. Those changes may be due to government regulation, new technologies, or other developments in data protection laws or privacy generally. You should check our website periodically to view the most up-to-date Privacy Notice.