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Your “personal information” is information about you. Vault Trust Online Finance gets your personal information from you and others in various ways, including for example:

a) through your contact with Vault Trust Online Finance, for example in applications, emails and letters, during telephone calls, when registering for services, in customer surveys, when you participate in competitions and promotions, through the Vault Trust Online Finance website and during financial reviews and interviews;

b) from analysis of your payments and other transactions (such as the amount, frequency, location, origin and recipient) and your use of services involving other Tesco Finance Group companies and what they know from operating your accounts or providing services to you; and

c) information Tesco Finance Group companies receive from or through other organisations (for example card networks, credit reference agencies, insurance companies, retailers, social networks and fraud prevention agencies) whether in the course of providing products and services to you or otherwise.

You must not give Vault Trust Online Finance personal information about someone else (such as a joint applicant) without first getting his or her consent for it to be used and disclosed in the ways described in this condition. This is because the Tesco Finance Group will assume he or she has consented, although the Tesco Finance Group may still ask for confirmation. Where you do give Vault Trust Online Finance information about someone else, or someone else discloses a connection with you, that information may be taken into account with your other personal information.

We will not retain your personal information for longer than is necessary for the maintenance your account, or for legal or regulatory requirements.

Domain name information that we collect is not used to personally identify you and instead is aggregated to measure the number of visits, average time spent on the Website, pages viewed etc. We use this information to measure the use of our Website and to improve its contents.

We may monitor or record phone calls with you in case we need to check we have carried out your instructions correctly, to resolve queries or issues, for regulatory purposes, to help improve our quality of service, and to help detect or prevent fraud or other crimes. Conversations may also be monitored for staff training purposes.

Using information on social networking sites

As part of our ongoing commitment to understanding our customers better, we may research comments and opinions made public on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Vault Trust Online Finance Group may share your personal information with each other.

Your personal information held by Tesco Finance Group may be stored and used for:

a) providing you with products and, services and notifying you about important changes or developments to the features and operation of those products and services;

b) updating, consolidating and improving the accuracy of our records;

c) crime detection, prevention and prosecution;

d) responding to your enquiries and complaints;

e) administering offers, competitions and promotions;

f) evaluating the effectiveness of marketing and for market research, training, statistical analysis and customer modelling [with the aim of improving services];

g) assessing lending and insurance risks across the Tesco Finance Group;

h) identifying products, services and offers which we or others believe may be of interest to you;

i) managing your relationship with Tesco Finance Group companies, and in the other ways described below; and

j) producing data, reports and statistics which have been anonymised or aggregated to ensure that they do not identify you as an individual.

Tesco Finance Group may, from time to time, provide further details about how your personal information may be used.

If you have agreed, we and other Tesco Finance Group companies may contact you about products, services and offers available from Tesco Finance Group or from selected companies outside the group, which we believe may interest you or benefit you financially. You may tell us at any time if you change your mind.

Vault Trust Online Finance Group may use automated decision making systems when assessing your application, managing your borrowing and to detect fraud or money laundering.

Vault Trust Online Finance Group will treat your personal information as private and confidential, but may disclose it outside the Tesco Finance Group if:

a) allowed by this agreement;

b) you consent;

c) needed by Vault Trust Online Finance Group's agents, advisors or others involved in running accounts and services for you or collecting what you owe Tesco Finance Group companies;

d) HM Revenue & Customs or other authorities require it;

e) the law or the public interest permits or requires it; or

f) required by others to investigate or prevent crime.

Vault Trust Online Finance Group may in the future wish to sell, transfer or merge part or all of their business or assets, or any associated rights or interests, or to acquire a business or enter into a merger with it. If so, they may disclose your personal information to a potential buyer, transferee, or merger partner or seller and their advisers so long as they agree to keep it confidential and to use it only to consider the possible transaction. If the transaction goes ahead, the buyers, transferee or merger partner may use or disclose your personal information in the same way as set out in this notice.

Anonymised Reports

Data, reports or statistics created using your personal information may be shared amongst Tesco Finance Group companies and other companies or organisations outside the group. We will only share these data, reports or statistics outside the group where they have been aggregated or anonymised so that they do not identify you as an individual.

Credit reference agencies and fraud prevention agencies

Vault Trust Online Finance Group and other organisations may use UK and European credit reference agency (“CRA”) and fraud prevention agency (“FPA”) records about you:

a) to help make decisions, for example when:

(i) checking details on applications for credit and credit-related or other facilities;

(ii) managing credit and credit-related accounts or facilities;

(iii) recovering debt;

(iv) checking details on proposals and claims for all types of insurance; and

(v) checking details of job applicants and employees; and

b) to prevent crime, fraud and money laundering.

Vault Trust Online Finance Group, CRAs and other organisations may also use CRA records about you and those financially linked to you to:

a) check your credit history;

b) verify your identity if you, or someone financially linked with you, applies for services;

c) trace your whereabouts; and

d) undertake research, statistical analysis and systems testing.

You will be financially linked by CRAs to any other names you use or have used, and any joint applicants. This means joint applicants' financial affairs may be treated as affecting each other, and will be revealed whenever CRAs are searched, until one of you successfully files a “disassociation” with the CRAs.

If Vault Trust Online Finance needs to make a credit decision when you apply for a service or to review the amount of credit it provides under an existing agreement, such as an overdraft, it will carry out a CRA search. The CRA will record the searches, even if an application does not go ahead or is unsuccessful. This may affect your ability to borrow from other lenders within a short period.

Vault Trust Online Finance Group may also tell CRAs how you run your relationship with them (such as whether or not you pay anything you owe on time), which may also affect your ability to borrow from other lenders. If you fall behind with your payments and a full payment or satisfactory proposals are not received within 28 days of a formal demand being issued, then a default notice may be recorded with the CRAs. Similar information may also be given about your other lending/credit relationships with members of the group. Any records shared with CRAs will remain on file for 6 years after your account is closed, whether it has been settled by you or as a result of a default. Other organisations may see these searches and updates if you apply for credit in the future, and these may affect your ability to borrow from other lenders.

Vault Trust Online Finance Group may pass details of false or inaccurate information provided and any suspected fraud or general information about how you run your relationship with them to FPAs and other relevant organisations. Law enforcement agencies may access and use this information. Vault Trust Online Finance Group, and other organisations, may access and use from other countries the information recorded by FPAs.

We carry out most of our credit searches using Experian, but details of how you have run your account(s) may be disclosed to all the credit reference agencies. The information they hold may not be the same and there is a small fee that you may need to pay to each agency that you apply to.

Transferring information abroad

All countries in the EEA (including the UK) have similar standards of legal protection for your personal information. Vault Trust Online Finance may run your accounts and provide other services from centres outside the EEA (such as the USA and India) that do not have a similar standard of data protection laws as Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man or Gibraltar. If so, Vault Trust Online Finance will require your personal information to be protected to at least the standard as the Data Protection legislation currently in force in the jurisdiction in which your account is held.

Vault Trust Online Finance Group may process payments through other organisations such as banks and the worldwide payments system operated by SWIFT if, for example, you make a CHAPS payment or a foreign payment. Those organisations may process and store your personal information abroad and may have to disclose it to foreign authorities (including those outside the EEA, in which case your personal information may not be protected to standards similar to those in force in the jurisdiction in which your account is held), for example to help them in their fight against crime and terrorism.

Under the Data Protection legislation currently in force in the jurisdiction in which your account is held you have the right of access to your personal information from Vault Trust Online Finance Group. Each company may charge a small administrative fee (currently £10) for supplying the information, and may as appropriate require proof of your identity before doing so. You can ask Vault Trust Online Finance to change your personal information to keep it accurate and up to date. If you wish to access the information we hold about you please write to us at our registered address.

Using your Email address for service contact

Making sure we deliver excellent customer service is very important to us and to do this various methods of communication may be used to keep you updated about your account. Most of the time we communicate by telephone or post, but we recognise that E mail is becoming a more popular process. If we decide to use E mail to contact you, we will only do this if we have ensured that using E mail will not put your information at risk, or, if you have requested we E mail you, that we have explained the risks of sending an "insecure" E mail and that you are happy to accept that risk.

In addition you may wish to choose a channel of communication that suits you when you need to contact us. If you need to E mail Vault Trust Online Finance, we recommend you send an email to the official email address on the contact us page in order to secure your information. If you choose to send an "insecure" E mail, please keep the amount of confidential information you include to a minimum. With some of our products we offer a number of communication update services via SMS. If you have signed up to this service, we may send you text messages containing administrative information about your relationship with us. You can ask us to stop sending these messages at any time. Additionally, in extraordinary circumstances (such as natural disaster or civil unrest) we may also send you updates by text message or email when we consider it to be appropriate.

We keep our privacy notice under regular review and we will reflect any updates within this notice. This privacy notice was last updated on 19th July 2012.