When you use any of our Services, we may disclose your personal information to the following parties:
5.1.1. other members of the Moneysupermarket Group (excluding MoneySavingExpert.com) in accordance with section 4;
5.1.2. MoneySavingExpert.com: (i) to communicate with you, including (if you consent) sending you information about products and services which may be of interest to you; (ii) to speed up form filling, or to personalise, or improve your experience on its website, mobile applications or other similar devices, channels or applications; or (iii) in accordance with its privacy policy;
5.1.3. Decision Technologies – where you run an energy price comparison enquiry via the Decision Technologies partner network we will work with them to generate a quote and enable you to apply and purchase energy products on the sites of the Decision Technologies partner network. See the Decision Technologies privacy policy for how your personal information is shared with us. You can see a list of the Decision Technologies partners here.
5.1.4. our channel operators – When you use the Services we may share your personal information with our channel operators for them to use it in accordance with section 4 above. Where our channel operators collect your personal information on a channel which is maintained by them, they will be acting as the data controller of your personal information provided in relation to a quote. You can see a list of our channel operators including a link to their websites here.
5.1.5. our partners including companies whose products or services are included on our Sites:
5.1.5.1. in order to display quotes on the Sites we will send your personal information to our panel of insurance partners. We need to send them your personal information so that they can generate a quote for us to display on the Sites. When these companies use your personal information in this way, they will be acting as data controllers of your personal information which means that they are in charge of how they handle your data and we are not responsible for this;
5.1.5.2. to provide you with our eligibility checker service, your personal information will be sent to our panel of credit card and loan providers so that we can show you which credit cards or loans that you’re most likely to be accepted for. If you choose to click through to some of our money partners to submit an application, to make it easier for you to complete your application we may pass the personal information you provide on the Sites to our partners to pre-populate fields on our partners’ website to save you having to input your information again; and
5.1.5.3 on some of our journeys you can apply and purchase our partners’ products on our Sites (for example energy products, travel insurance and life insurance). When you purchase a Product on our Sites any contract will be entered into between you and the relevant product provider and so we will pass your personal information to them.
If you click through to any of our partners websites, provide them with additional information on their websites and/or if you decide to purchase a product from any of our partners then they will be data controllers of your personal information and you should read their own privacy policy which you should find on their website.
You can see a list of our partners here:
Money, Energy, Broadband & Mobile
5.1.6. other service providers that we engage to help us provide certain services and/or functionality, such as whether products are suitable for you. These include:
5.1.6.1. our service providers who enable our eligibility checker services (see section 5.2 below for more information)
5.1.6.2. UnderwriteMe Limited who will process your personal information to provide fully and partially underwritten life insurance quotations and to deal with enquiries relating to your policy, statistical purposes, claims management and the prevention and detection of fraud. Where required by law, regulatory requirement or for the prevention or detection of a crime UnderwriteMe may share your personal information with (i) UnderwriteMe’s group companies and (ii) our life insurance providers. UnderwriteMe will also use data which has been anonymized for underwriting, claims, pricing research and helping UnderwriteMe better understand consumer behaviour;
5.1.6.3. market research agencies who may contact you on our behalf in order to ask you to assist us with our research;
5.1.6.4 our service provider who helps us to provide customer insight products to enable subscribers to develop and improve their products for you; and
5.1.6.5 our service provider who helps us by providing your supplier details and energy usage when you run an Energy journey, allowing us to find energy deals based on this information; and
5.1.6.6 if you switch energy supplier with us, to keep you informed as to the status of your switch and to provide you with our Energy Monitoring Services, our third party partners who help us to facilitate your application to switch energy providers and to keep you updated as to the status of your switch, as well as the energy providers themselves. Please see our
Terms and Conditions for more information on our Energy Monitor services;
5.1.7. the DVLA and DVSA:
5.1.7.1. if you give us your driving licence number when obtaining a motor insurance quote, it may be submitted by us or our partners to the DVLA MyLicence service in order to verify the status of your (or any named driver's) licence and entitlement along with any relevant restriction information, endorsement and/or conviction data. The insurers may carry out the searches themselves or we may perform them and then pass the results to the insurers. These driving licence searches may be made when you first use our Services and subsequently throughout the duration of your insurance policy. These searches will not show on your (or your named driver's) DVLA driving licence record. Carrying out these searches may help insurers to prevent fraud and reduce the need for insurers to cancel policies for negligent misrepresentation and non-disclosure of important information. For details of the information about you that the DVLA may hold, please see http://www.mylicence.org.uk/.
5.1.7.2. If you run a car insurance journey on our Sites and confirm you have the relevant vehicle we can match your car registration number with public sector information to obtain the dates that your car tax and MOT will need renewing so that we can add these dates to your homepage for you to see next time you log in and, if you sign up to receive them, send you car tax and MOT reminders via email before these fall due. This car tax and MOT information is accessed by us from public sector information under the terms of the Open Government Licence 3.0. MoneySuperMarket does not warrant the accuracy of any information relating to your vehicle’s MOT and tax status, and does not accept any liability for any inaccurate information accessed by it in this way.
5.1.8. Where permitted or required by law or regulation, we may also disclose information about you (including electronic identifiers such as IP addresses) and/or access your account in order to comply with legal or regulatory requirements for example:
5.1.8.1. if required to do so by any court, the Financial Conduct Authority, the Competition and Markets Authority or any other applicable regulatory, compliance, Governmental or law enforcement agency;
5.1.8.2. if necessary in connection with legal proceedings or potential legal proceedings;
5.1.8.3. in connection with the sale or potential sale of all or part of our business; and/or
5.1.8.4. if we reasonably believe false or inaccurate information has been provided and fraud is suspected, details may be passed to fraud prevention agencies to prevent fraud and money laundering.
5.2. Credit Information Services & Soft Credit Checks
When you use the Services a ‘soft’ credit check may be carried out against your credit report by our service providers for the following purposes:
5.2.1. to enable our eligibility checker services (see section 5.2.3 below for more information);
5.2.2 to provide you with your credit history including your credit score and credit report when you use the Credit Monitor Services (see section 5.2.4 below for more information);
5.2.3 on some of our mortgage journeys including: (i) to enable our mortgage account number retrieval service (see section 5.2.8 below for more information); and (ii) if you apply for a decision in principle from some of our lender partners as part of our re-mortgage journey (when your chosen lender will carry out a soft credit check).
5.2.4 Many of our partners will also carry out checks with credit reference agencies when they generate a quote for comparison both at the time you request a quote and at renewal. You should read their privacy policy for more information on how they carry out these checks (see 5.3.2. for further information).
‘Soft’ credit checks are carried out by using credit reference agencies in order to (i) assess your financial and insurance profile; (ii) verify your identity; and/or (iii) to help prevent fraud. The credit reference agencies may keep a record of the search and you may see this recorded against your credit file but these ‘soft’ credit checks have no impact on your credit rating. ‘Soft’ credit checks are visible on your credit report but do not show up in the same way as a 'hard' check. Where a ‘soft’ credit check is required for our eligibility checker service or our Credit Monitor Services we engage the following service providers:
5.2.5. Capital One plc ("Capital One"), HD Decisions - an Experian business ("HD"), Shawbrook Bank Limited (“Shawbrook”) and other credit cards and loans providers, who in turn partner with the following UK credit reference agencies: TransUnion and Experian Ltd ("Experian") from time to time to enable our eligibility checker services. If you use our eligibility services, a credit report will be generated by carrying out a 'soft' credit check. The ‘soft’ credit checks will be used by Capital One, HD and Shawbrook and other providers, to match against those providers' own lending criteria. This information will be used to let you know your percentage chances of successfully obtaining a credit card or loan. Note that your credit report will not be provided to you directly and we will not receive it either unless you use our Credit Monitor Services (see paragraph 5.2.4). For further information about how your details will be used please see the rest of our Privacy Policy and Capital One's and HD's and Shawbrook’s own terms and conditions.
5.2.6. If you use our Credit Monitor Services (including our Score Predictor service) we will pass on your personal information to TransUnion and your credit history and related information will be obtained from them. References to “TransUnion” in this Privacy Policy mean TransUnion International UK Limited (company number 0496832), which is part of the TransUnion Information Group. TransUnion is a credit reference agency authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority under number 737740, whose registered office is at One Park Lane, West Yorkshire, LS3 1EP. Authorisation can be checked on the Financial Services Register at www.fca.org.uk. To find out more about TransUnion, please visit https://www.transunion.co.uk/consumer-solutions/help/credit-reference-agency. Any county court judgment information that we give to you is also provided by TransUnion. The Credit Monitor Services will leave ‘soft’ credit checks, which are visible to you on your credit report but do not show up to other organisations in the same way as a 'hard' check. For further information about how your information will be used please see the rest of our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Please also read TransUnion's own privacy policy for information about how they obtain, use and share your personal information.
5.2.7 We also use TransUnion’s services as part of our identity verification procedures. Please see their separate Bureau Privacy Notice for more information about this.
5.2.8 If you use the mortgage account number retrieval service available on some of our mortgage journeys then your mortgage account number will be obtained from Experian by carrying out a soft credit check. Our mortgage channel operator, Podium, will pass your information to Experian to enable this service. Please see Experian’s terms for more information on how they use your details and you can find Podium’s terms here.
5.3. How do our partners use your personal information and who might they share it with?
In order to provide you with a quote, our partners may exchange information about you with other companies and/or carry out checks with various databases. Our partners act as data controllers in respect of this use of personal information and we are not responsible for it. We have set out below some of the common ways they will share your information:
5.3.1. Some of our partners will use your personal information to assess your circumstances (including information about any third party who is named on the policy) and verify the information that you have provided before providing a quote to you;
5.3.2. Some partners may carry out checks with fraud prevention and credit reference agencies, both when you first run your quote and when we run an annual renewal quote. Insurers generally run these checks to ensure that they and credit partners have the necessary facts to assess your insurance risk, verify your identity, help prevent fraud and to provide you with their best premium and payment options). If partners do these checks, they will be quotation searches only and do not show up on your credit report in the same way that a ‘hard’ check does, but will be visible to other organisations. Both public data (e.g. the electoral roll) and private data (e.g. your personal credit history) may be checked in this way;
5.3.3. Some partners may carry out checks against data they already hold on you, (or is held by the company whose brand they administer the product for, or members of their group of companies) such as data from existing products, account data, data from previous product transactions, accounts you may hold with them or loyalty scheme data to share with insurers in order to determine your premium;
5.3.4. Our partners may also exchange data with certain industry databases such as the No Claims Discount Database, the Motor Insurance Anti-Fraud and Theft Register, the Claims and Underwriting Exchange (which holds records of incidents reported to insurers that may or may not have resulted in a claim) and the Hunter Database (a central insurance and claims checking system). If our partners carry out these searches, a record of the search will appear on your credit report;
5.3.5. Some of our partners may also check public and private higher education sources to obtain information about your educational background; and
5.3.6. Our partners may also share information with insurance underwriters. These checks are not unique to users of our Services - they may also be carried out if you obtain quotes from other sources.
This information exchange allows our partners to verify the information that is provided during the quote process (including information about any third party who is named on the policy), and also helps to detect fraudulent claims. Our partners may also use the data relating to your quotes and your personal information to create and improve the products and services they offer and to develop and improve their processes, credit risk systems and policies, so they can better meet the needs of their customers.
If you decide to enter into a contract with one of our partners through any of the Sites, the information you have provided to us, together with any further information requested by, and supplied by you or us to the partner, will be held by the partner for the purposes set out in their privacy policy and they will act as data controller of your personal information. Therefore, you are strongly advised to read your chosen provider's privacy policy and satisfy yourself as to the purposes for which the provider will use your personal information before entering into the contract. We have no responsibility for the uses to which a provider puts your personal information.