Read our privacy policy
This Privacy Policy explains how we will use your personal information when you interact with our Sites so please read it carefully.
SUMMARY
Below is a summary of some key terms of this Privacy Policy. We are committed to protecting your personal information when you use our Services and we want you to be confident that your personal information is safe and secure with us. This Privacy Policy explains how we use your personal information including the following:
where we collect your personal information from;
what personal information we collect;
how we use your personal information;
who your personal information is shared with; and
the rights and choices you have when it comes to your personal information.
Use of our website (our “Site”) is subject to our website Terms and Conditions. If you do not agree to these terms, please stop using the Site immediately.
Where we refer to “personal information” in this Privacy Policy, we mean information which constitutes “personal data” under the UK’s version of the General Data Protection Regulation (the “UK GDPR”). This can be any information that directly identifies you (such as your name or email address), but also information that identifies you indirectly or would identify you when pieced together with other information (such as your age, gender, demographic information, IP address, and cookie identifiers/other unique online identifiers).
The main reason we process your personal information is to provide you with the Site and the other services that you request from us (see section 4 below) (together, the “Services”). For certain purposes set out in section 5 below, we may share your personal information with group entities, our product partners, service providers, and regulatory or governmental bodies. We will only hold your personal information for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes for which we hold that personal information.
To make an enquiry or exercise any of your rights as set out in this Privacy Policy, please contact our Data Request Team at: datarequest@moneysupermarket.com.
1. Who are we?
1.1. We are MoneySuperMarket, part of MONY Group, which includes: MoneySavingExpert, Decision Technologies, CYTI, Travelsupermarket, icelolly, Quidco and Podium (all operating in the UK). We will take your privacy very seriously.
1.2. For the purposes of this Privacy Policy, references to "we", "us", "our" or “Site” are to MoneySuperMarket and exclude MoneySavingExpert, Decision Technologies, CYTI, Travelsupermarket, icelolly, Quidco and Podium who each have their own privacy policies. For details about how your personal information is shared within the MONY Group, see section 5.
1.3. MoneySuperMarket.com Limited (company number 3945937) is a controller in relation to the processing of the personal information that you provide to us when you use our Services. Its registered address is MONY Group House, St David's Park, Ewloe, Chester, CH5 3UZ. If you have any queries relating to our use of your personal information, if you want to contact our data protection officer or if you have any other related data protection questions, please contact our Data Request Team at datarequest@moneysupermarket.com or write to our Data Protection Officer at MONY Group House, St. David's Park, Ewloe, Flintshire, CH5 3UZ.
2. How do we collect personal information?
2.1. From you - Most of the personal information we collect will be directly from you when you use the Services. We will collect this information from you through the websites, mobile applications, or other similar devices, channels, or applications operated by or on behalf of MoneySuperMarket.
2.2. From our product partners - If you purchase a product from one of our partners whose products or services are included on our Site (“product partners”) then they may send us the information they hold relating to the product(s) you have purchased. This allows us to track sales and improve our Services. A list of our product partners can be found in section 5.
2.3. From our channel operators - Whilst the majority of the channels on our Site are run by us or other Moneysupermarket Group entities, some of our channels are designed, maintained, and/or run for us by our trusted channel operators. We may receive your personal information from our channel operators and use it in accordance with section 5 below. Where our channel operators collect your personal information on a channel that is maintained by them, they will be acting as a controller of your personal information. A list of our channel operators can be found in section 5.
2.4. From our suppliers - We will sometimes use other companies to collect and process your personal information on our behalf, for example, we may use IT service providers or market research agencies (see section 5 below for more detail on the categories of these suppliers). Where we use third party suppliers we will make sure that they commit to keeping your information safe.
We may also obtain personal information about you from suppliers, who hold data on you themselves – for example, if you use our Credit Score Services (either through the Apps or on our website), we will obtain information about your credit history for you from TransUnion (see sections 4.2.2 and 7 below for further information); and in order to show and send you car tax and MOT reminders, we will obtain the dates on which these fall due by accessing public sector information (see section 5.2.3.7 for further information).
3. What personal information do we collect?
3.1. The personal information we may collect when you use the Services includes:
3.1.1. your identity information such as name and date of birth;
3.1.2. your contact information such as address, email address and telephone number;
3.1.3. information you provide as part of your online enquiry which might include your vehicle/home information (in relation to our relevant insurance products) such as driving history and details about your vehicle/home;
3.1.4. your financial information, for example, bank account or payment details or information about your credit score and/or credit report;
3.1.5. in certain scenarios, recordings of the content of your communications with us such as calls, emails and SMSs, in accordance with data protection legislation and other applicable law. Monitoring or recording will always be for business purposes, such as for quality control and training (e.g. where you email our customer services team), to prevent unauthorised use of our telecommunication systems and Site, to ensure effective systems operation, to meet any legal obligation and/or to prevent or detect crime;
3.1.6. feedback you provide to us on your experience of using the Site, which we may have requested from you in order to ensure the Services we provide you continue to meet your needs. Any feedback you provide will only be used as part of our programme of continuous improvement and will not be published on the Site; and
3.1.7. information about how you come to our Site and how you use it, for example, the pages viewed, the website from which you came to visit our Site, changes you make to information you supply to us, details of the quotes you request and your transactions.
3.2. In order to provide you with a quote we may need to collect personal information which data protection law defines as special category data. This is personal information that is particularly sensitive, such as medical history. We may also process personal information relating to your criminal convictions. We cannot display quotes for certain types of insurance (such as life insurance or vehicle insurance) without this information. We may also need to share this personal information with our product partners to enable them to generate a quote for you (which we are allowed to do under data protection legislation in order to arrange and/or advise on an insurance contract). For details of our product partners that we share this information with, please see section 5.2.2 of this Privacy Policy.
3.3. We do not knowingly collect or store any personal information about children under the age of 16 years with the exception of certain travel insurance products which are available to children between the ages of 13-16; and certain life insurance products which require us to collect and store personal information of under 18s (but we will ask the adult intending to obtain the life insurance policy to provide this information).
3.4. If you are providing us with another person's information (for example where you request a policy that includes another person as a joint policyholder, obtaining quotes for a family member, or provide information about other family members (including under 18s) when requesting a quote for a life insurance policy) we recommend that you first ask them to read this Privacy Policy and our Terms and Conditions, and confirm with them that they are happy for you to provide the information to us and that they understand how their details will be used.
3.5. Note that it is your responsibility to check and ensure that all information, content, material, or personal information you provide on the Site is correct, complete, accurate, and not misleading and that you disclose all relevant facts.
4. How do we use your personal information?
We use your personal information for the following purposes:
4.1. For the management of our Site and other Services:
4.1.1. verifying your identity, managing, running and administering your account or use of any mobile applications if you choose to set up a Site account or download mobile applications. You must be aged 16 years and over to create an account on the Site, please see section 3.3 of this Privacy Policy;
4.1.2. passing it to our product partners including companies whose products or services are included on our Site, with a view to them providing you with an online quote or eligibility score for the product/service requested by you. When our product partners use your personal information to provide a quote they will act as controllers of your personal information – you can see links to lists of our product partners in section 5.2.2 below;
4.1.3. to pre-populate fields on the Site when making return visits to obtain new quotes for the same product(s) or quotes across other channels on the Site. This will make it easier for you to use the Site by storing the personal information you provide to us (for example, your postal address and email address) and by storing personal information of any individuals associated with your accounts for example a family member or a friend. Sometimes, this involves us placing “cookies” or other tracking technologies on our Site; for more information on cookies, see section 9;
4.1.4. to process a transaction between you and a third party - we will use a third party payment processing provider, Stripe, for these purposes;
4.1.5. to track sales, which may involve product partners sharing data with us relating to the product(s) you have purchased, this involves us placing “cookies” or other tracking technologies on our Site;
4.1.6. to fulfil offers you are eligible for or have applied for through the Site, for example if you qualify for any rewards. Where we use third parties to help us to fulfil offers, we may also need to share your personal information with them. This will also be detailed in the relevant terms and conditions for that offer;
4.1.7. if you have an account with us and have switched energy supplier with us or requested a car insurance quote, to provide you with information on your account dashboards such as information around your energy switch or your MOT, tax or car insurance renewal date. In order to display this information, we will monitor the progress of your switch in energy provider and/or will access information from public sector sources in relation to your car MOT/tax/insurance renewal (see section 5 for more information on how we access this information and section 4.3 for how we may further communicate with you about this);
4.1.8. by matching our data with data from other sources including to validate your information and make our Services easy to use:
4.1.8.1. we may validate and analyse your information and, in some cases, match it against information that has been collected by a third party to ensure that the information we hold about you is accurate, consistent and well-organised and in order to make our Services as easy to use as possible. For example, you may be required to provide your address when using the Services. In order to streamline this process, we may display address look-up services offered by third party partners. When you enter your postcode into the search bar associated with these services, we pass this information directly to the relevant third party partner, to facilitate the look up of your street address;
4.1.8.2. to help gather all the information that is required to carry out the Service you have requested (particularly if some of this information may be difficult for you to locate) and to pre-populate some of the information required to carry out the Service for you by providing estimated figures. For example, as part of a request from you to switch your energy partner, we may match your address to the corresponding MPAN/MPRN (which are numbers used to identify the energy/gas supply points in your home) to help facilitate the switch (see sections 9 and 10 of our Terms and Conditions for more information on our energy products and services);
4.2. To enable us and our product partners and/or service providers to check or monitor your credit score and/or credit report, in connection with certain financial products and Services (see section 7 below for more details on who your information is shared with and what sort of processing the generation of these checks involve):
4.2.1. when you use our eligibility checker services (for example on our loans and credit cards journeys) a credit report will be generated by carrying out a 'soft' credit check. We do not carry out these checks. Instead, we pass your personal information to our trusted service provider HD Decisions - an Experian business (HD), Qualifi or certain of our panel of lenders who will generate these checks with their chosen credit reference agencies;
4.2.2. when you use our Credit Score Services, we provide your personal information to TransUnion, who will provide us with your credit score and/or credit report (as applicable) at least once per month (see also our Terms and Conditions for more information on our Credit Score Services). This will leave a footprint (also known as a ‘soft’ search) on your credit file, which does not affect your score and is not visible to lenders, but which will be visible to you. We request this ‘soft’ search from TransUnion on your behalf for up to thirty-six (36) months following receipt of authorisation from you and will continue to request this ‘soft search’ on an ongoing basis whilst you are still using the Credit Score Service. Please see section 7.1 for more details on soft credit checks. To enable us to supply you with your credit report and/or credit score (as applicable), you will need to authorise us to submit a subject access request on your behalf to TransUnion for that information under Article 15 of the UK GDPR;
4.2.3. when we provide you with information in order to renew your insurance quote, we may also send that information to our insurance partners so that they can calculate their quotes and they may carry out ‘soft’ credit checks on you with credit reference agencies of their own choosing. These checks may be performed ahead of the renewal date on your insurance policy. As above, the ‘soft’ credit checks carried out by our insurance partners may appear on your credit report but they will have no impact on your credit rating;
4.3. To communicate with you, including some or all of the following:
4.3.1. sending you information about products and services which we think may be of interest to you. We will contact you (depending on your contact preferences) via email, SMS, or by other electronic means such as via social and digital media. This may include new product launches and, newsletters. When you give us your details to run a comparison you will be given an opportunity to let us know if you don’t want to receive marketing communications from us. If you are using our App and have enabled push notifications on your device, we may send you marketing messages through push notifications. If you don’t want to receive marketing communications from us, you’ll need to let us know every time you run a comparison. You can also opt out of receiving marketing communications at any time – see section 12 below.
This won’t affect any communications that we need to send you for the purpose of being able to provide our Services (see section 4.3.2 and 4.3.3).
4.3.2. sending you a confirmation email of your quote – when you obtain a quote with us, you will automatically be sent confirmation of your quote by email or SMS so that you have a record of it;
4.3.3. sending you information about the savings and credit management services. For example, if you:
4.3.3.1. have subscribed to our Credit Score Services, then we will contact you (through email, push notifications, or in-App messaging) to let you know when your credit score from TransUnion, and/or credit report (as applicable) have been updated, how you can access our guides on credit scores and credit reports, or notifying you of significant changes to your credit score or report (see section 7 below for further information)
4.3.3.2. have switched energy supplier with us, we may inform you (through email, push notifications, or in-App messaging) of when your application to switch energy supplier has been received, update you as to the progress of your switch (including if your switch has been rejected for any reason) and when your switch is complete (please see section 9 of our Terms and Conditions for further information); and
4.3.4. to communicate with you at your request to offer help and support and to resolve any Service issues, including via live chat if you use our energy or life insurance comparison services.
4.4. To personalise and improve aspects of our Services including:
4.4.1. to improve the personalised content and insights on our Site and/or as part of our direct marketing communications. The information we collect helps us tailor our content and improve our suggestions to you and other users about products or services that may interest you or them. For example, we may undertake analysis and profiling of your credit information when you use our Credit Score services in order to identify and inform you of products that we consider are likely to interest you or be suited to your credit circumstances. We also use that information to provide you with general insights about your credit health. These recommendations and insights might either be provided via direct marketing communications (as described in section 4.3 above), or through the display of information on our Site;
4.4.2. to improve personalised content and insights on other websites (for both you, and others). We make use of audience tools from digital and social media providers which enable them to match your hashed contact information that we provide them against the contact information they hold and target you on their sites based on information about your use of our Site. They might also use the same information to target advertising to other users on their websites who they have identified as being potentially interested in the same recommendations and insights. We may also submit information about your use of the Site, collected through cookies, to social media providers as part of the audience tools described above. See section 9 for more details on our use of cookies for these purposes; and
4.4.3. to help our product partners understand customer behaviours and develop and tailor their product offerings we may pass certain personal information to them (e.g. through our customer insight products that are available to subscribers).
4.5. For research, such as analysing market trends and customer demographics including:
4.5.1. we may contact you to ask you to assist us with market research by asking you questions about the Services and asking you if you would like to complete a review of the Services. We may sometimes ask market research companies to contact you on our behalf and may use this information to improve our Sites and Services; and
4.5.2. to use personal information relating to your quotes, your personal information, special category data in relation to life insurance quotes, and information about the policies and contracts you have taken out in order to carry out various other research and analysis activities designed to help us review and improve the Site or our Services, such as journey optimisation.
4.6 To generate responses using AI alternatively referred to as “large language models” (LLM) such as ChatGPT (“AI Tools”). Some parts of our Site allow use of AI Tools to help you research products and provide estimates. You don’t have to use these AI Tools and we’ll always let you know which of our Services use AI Tools. We’ll use the minimum amount of personal information required to enable responses to be generated. The AI Tools should be used in accordance with our Terms and Conditions.
4.7. To meet any legal obligation and/or to prevent or detect crime – for example, if a court or regulator, Governmental, compliance or law enforcement agency requires us to disclose your personal information; if it is necessary for us to disclose your personal information in connection with legal proceedings; or in order to prevent fraud and money laundering, which might involve disclosure to a fraud prevention agency. See section 5 for more detail on the parties we might disclose your personal information to for these purposes.
4.8. To enable a sale or potential sale of all or part of our business.
Some of the purposes listed above may involve us placing “cookies” or other tracking technologies on our Site; for more information on cookies and the purposes for which we place them, see Section 9.
Please also refer to the section on online advertising at section 10, which provides more detail on our advertising-related personalisation activities.
5. Who is your personal information shared with?
5.1. When you use any of our Services, we may share your personal information other entities within the MONY Group (as detailed at section 1.1 above). The MONY Group operates a shared IT infrastructure which includes shared technologies, platforms, systems and tools. Your personal information may be shared with other MONY Group entities as a result of this shared infrastructure. We implement shared security measures on this system which comply with data protection law and ensure that there are adequate internal controls to keep the personal information secure. This information might be used and analysed in order to improve products and services across the Group. However, the different entities will not use your personal information to send you direct marketing or target you with advertising if you’ve opted out of receiving this (see section 4.3.1 above). We’ll never share your personal information with third parties for the purpose of allowing them to send you direct marketing;
5.2. When you use any of our Services, we may also share your personal information with the following third parties:
5.2.1. our channel operators (i.e., operators we partner with to help run certain aspects of our Sites and our Services) so that they may use this information in accordance with section 4 above. Where our channel operators collect your personal information on a channel that is maintained by them, they will be acting as a controller of that personal information. As mentioned in section 2.3 above, we may also receive your personal information from our channel operators and use it in accordance with this policy. You can see a list of our channel operators including a link to their websites here.
5.2.2. our product partners whose products or services are included on our Site:
5.2.2.1. in order to display quotes on the Site we will send your personal information to our panel of product partners who provide the products you are requesting a quote for. We need to send them your personal information so that they can generate a quote for us to display on the Site. When these companies use your personal information in this way, they will be acting as controllers of your personal information which means that they are in charge of how they handle your personal information. Please see section 6 of this policy which includes further detail about how our product partners process your personal information as controllers (including any third party sources they obtain your personal information from);
5.2.2.2. in order to make our eligibility checker service available to you, your personal information will be sent to our panel of product partners who provide credit card and loan services including Capital One Bank (Europe) plc (Capital One), Shawbrook Bank Limited (Shawbrook), Admiral Financial Services Limited (Admiral), Hastings Financial Services Limited (Hastings), Mitsubishi HC Capital UK PLC Trading as Novuna Consumer Finance (Novuna), Lendable Operations Limited (Lendable), Oakbrook Finance Limited (Oakbrook) and Zopa Bank Limited (Zopa) so that we can show you which credit cards or loans that you’re most likely to be accepted for (see also section 7 for detail on how your personal information may be shared with our service provider HD (Experian), Qualifi and other credit reference agencies selected by certain credit card and loan product partners, to provide the eligibility checker service);
5.2.2.3. if you choose to click through to any of our product 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 Site to those product partners to pre-populate fields on their website to save you having to input your information again;
5.2.2.4. on some of our journeys you can apply and purchase our partners’ products on our Site (for example energy products, travel insurance and life insurance). When you purchase a product on our Site, any contract will be entered into between you and the relevant product partner and so we will pass your personal information to them;
5.2.2.5. if you click through to any of our product partners' websites, provide them with additional information on their websites, and/or if you decide to purchase a product from any of our product partners then they will be controllers of your personal information and you should read their own privacy policy which you should find on their website.
5.2.2.6. You can see a list of our product partners in the "Who does Moneysupermarket work with" section of our "About us" page.
5.2.3. other third party service providers that we engage to help us provide certain services and/or functionality including:
5.2.3.1. LifeSearch Limited who will process your personal information to provide a fully or partially underwritten life insurance quote and to deal with enquiries relating to your policy, statistical purposes, claims management, and the prevent and detection of fraud. LifeSearch will share your personal information with dedicated insurance companies who sit on their panel."
5.2.3.2. market research agencies who may contact you on our behalf in order to ask you to assist us with our research;
5.2.3.3. our service providers who help us to fulfil offers that you have applied or qualified for; for example, if you qualify for any of our incentives or rewards from certain service providers;
5.2.3.4. our service providers who help us to provide customer insight products to enable subscribers to develop and improve their products for you;
5.2.3.5. our service providers who help 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;
5.2.3.6. our service providers (including, but not limited to automated decision-making software) who assist us with the processing of customer queries;
5.2.3.7. if you switch energy suppliers with us, to keep you informed as to the status of your switch, our third party partners who help us to facilitate your application to switch energy partners and to keep you updated as to the status of your switch, as well as the energy partners themselves. Please see our Terms and Conditions for more information on our Energy Monitor services;
5.2.3.8. the DVLA and DVSA - if you give us your driving licence number when obtaining a motor insurance quote, it may be submitted by us or our product 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 www.viewdrivingrecord.service.gov.uk;
5.2.3.9. third party credit reference agencies and service providers who enable our eligibility checker services (see section 6 below for more information).
5.2.4. public sector sources -if you run a car insurance journey on our Site 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 send you car tax and MOT reminders via email before these falls 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.
5.2.5. 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:
5.2.5.1. if required to do so by any court, to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) or any other applicable regulatory, compliance, Governmental or law enforcement agency;
5.2.5.2. if necessary in connection with legal proceedings or potential legal proceedings, to the applicable court or law enforcement authority, or party to the proceedings;
5.2.5.3. in connection with the sale or potential sale of all or part of our business, to the actual or proposed buyer and their professional service providers/other authorised individuals who are under obligations of confidentiality; and/or
5.2.5.4. 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.
5.2.6 certain providers of promotions if you consent to participating in one of our prize draws or other competitions.
6. In more detail: Use of your personal information by our product partners
6.1. Providing a quote: In order to provide you with a quote, our product partners may exchange information about you with other companies and/or carry out checks with various databases. Our product partners act as controllers in respect of this use of personal information. This means that they determine why and how your personal information is being processed for their own purposes. Please see section 5 above for a list of our product partners and links to their privacy policies.
We have set out below some of the common ways that product partners will share and use your information:
6.1.1. Some of our product 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;
6.1.2. Some product 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 provide you with their best premium and payment options. If product 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;
6.1.3. Some product 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;
6.1.4. Our product partners may also use the personal information 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;
6.1.5. Our product partners may also exchange personal information 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 product partners carry out these searches, a record of the search will appear on your credit report;
6.1.6. Some of our product partners may also check public and private higher education sources to obtain information about your educational background; and
6.1.7. Our product 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 product 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.
6.2. Entering into a contract: If you decide to enter into a contract with one of our product 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 product partner, will be held by the product partner for the purposes set out in their privacy policy and as above they will act as a controller of your personal information. Therefore, you are strongly advised to read your chosen product partner's privacy policy and satisfy yourself as to the purposes for which the product partner will use your personal information before entering into the contract. We have no responsibility for the uses to which a product partner puts your personal information.
7. In more detail: Credit Information Services & Soft Credit Checks
7.1. ‘Soft’ credit checks
7.1.1. When you use some of our Services a ‘soft’ credit check may be carried out against your credit report 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. These ‘soft’ credit checks are not carried out by us but by the chosen credit reference agencies of our service providers or panel members as described below;
7.1.2. The scenarios where a ‘soft’ credit check may be performed are as follows:
7.1.2.1. to enable our eligibility checker services (see section 7.1.3.1 below);
7.1.2.2. to provide you with your credit history including your credit score and credit report when you use the Credit Score Services (see section 4.2.2 and 7.1.3.2 below for more information);
7.1.2.3. on some of our mortgage journeys run by our mortgage channel operator, Podium, including: (i) to enable our mortgage account number retrieval service (see section 7.1.3.4 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);
7.1.2.4. our product 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 5.2.2 for further information).
7.1.3. Where a ‘soft’ credit check is performed as part of our Services they are carried out by the following:
7.1.3.1. if you use our eligibility checker services then your information will be shared with HD and for secured loans Qualifi's (our trusted service providers) and some of our credit card and loans partners including Capital One, Shawbrook, Admiral, Hastings, Novuna, Lendable, Oakbrook and Zopa. These in turn partner with the following UK credit reference agencies: TransUnion and Experian Ltd (Experian) from time to time. 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 HD, Qualifi's and the other partners mentioned above, to match against those partners' 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 Score Services. For further information about how your details will be used please see the rest of our Privacy Policy, HD’s and Qualifi's and our credit and loan partners own privacy policy and terms and conditions;
7.1.3.2. If you use our Credit Score Services, 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 Score 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 and Conditions. Please also read TransUnion's own privacy policy for information about how they obtain, use, and share your personal information;
7.1.3.3. 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;
7.1.3.4. 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.
7.1.4. Many of our product 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, which will include their selection (as controller) of their own credit reference agencies to use for these purposes.
8. What are our legal grounds for processing your personal information?
We will only collect and use your personal information in accordance with applicable data protection laws. Our legal grounds for processing your personal information in the ways described in this Privacy Policy are as follows:
8.1. Performance of a contract – In order to provide you with the Services and manage your account we will: (i) share your personal information with or search the websites of our product partners to get you the quotes and/or access information required to provide you with the relevant Service from our third party partners (including our eligibility checker, Credit Score or insurance renewal services, which may result in a ‘soft’ credit search); (ii) process any transaction between you and a third party; (iii) manage, run and administer your account; (iv) send you an automatic confirmation email of your quote when you enter your personal information to receive a quote on our Site; (v) If you apply for an offer or incentive through the Site, we will also use your personal information to assess your eligibility and subject to availability, fulfil the offer or incentive where the eligibility criteria has been met. When we do these activities we are processing your personal information because it is necessary to perform the contract that we have in place with you to provide you with our Services, or to take steps at your request in order to enter into a contract with you.
8.2. Consent – We will use and process your personal information where you have told us you are happy for us to process it for a specific purpose(s), for example: (i) through consenting to cookies placed for certain advertising purposes (for more information on our use of cookies, see section 9); and (ii) consenting to conduct certain “audience” based targeting services by social media platform providers (see section 10).
You are able to withdraw your consent at any time (which will not affect the legal basis for the processing prior to your withdrawal of such consent).
8.3. Legitimate Interests – We may use and process some of your personal information where the benefits of doing it are not overridden by the interests or fundamental rights or freedoms of individuals. Under UK privacy laws, this is called the “legitimate interests” condition for processing your personal information. Our legitimate interests for processing your personal information are:
8.3.1. to monitor and communicate with you about the Services. It is in our legitimate interest to keep you informed about your use of the Services in order to improve our Services, for example:
informing you of your annual renewal quotes via your account dashboard (see section 4.1.7 for further information on these services);
if you have logged into our Site or created an account (including through our Apps) and run a car insurance enquiry with us and you confirm that you have the relevant vehicle, we will show you when your car tax, MOT or insurance are due for renewal next time you log in and visit your homepage (see section 7 of our Terms and Conditions for further information on these services);
if you have logged into our Site or created an account (including through our Apps) and run an energy enquiry with us, keeping you informed via an account dashboard of energy deals available on the market through a range of suppliers and informing you of the progress of your application to switch energy supplier (see section 9 of our Terms and Conditions for further information on these services);
if you have logged into our Site or created an account (including through our Apps) and complete an energy switch with us we will save your application information via YourAccount/Dashboard to enable you to quickly switch energy suppliers when your tariff ends; and
8.3.2. marketing: to tell you about products, services and insights which we think may be of interest to you, for online advertising (see section 10), to develop marketing content and enhance our marketing strategies. We won't send you marketing communications if you tell us not to;
8.3.3. to personalise and improve our Services, for example, we may undertake analysis and profiling on your personal information to personalise aspects of our service, including to personalise recommendations to you and others on other websites, such as social networks; and to streamline aspects of our service such as address look-up and the pre-population of forms. We constantly aim to improve our Services to you, and using your personal information in this way helps us to do this. We do not consider that these activities would produce legal effects, or have similarly significant effects on you;
8.3.4. for market research, analysis and product improvement, including to produce the customer insight products described at section 4.4.3 which are available to subscribers. These activities help us to regularly review and improve the products and services we or our partners provide. Where possible data that we use/provide in this way will be in an anonymised or pseudonymised format;
8.3.5. to help facilitate the sale or potential sale of all or part of our business. This enables us to achieve our strategic objectives and to enable the long-term commercial success of our company.
You have the right to object to our use of your personal information for these legitimate interests. If you raise an objection we will stop processing your personal information unless an exemption under UK data protection law applies, in which case we will let you know why we are continuing to process your personal information. Please contact our Data Request Team at: datarequest@moneysupermarket.com if you wish to exercise this right, see section 13 below for further information on your personal information rights.
8.4. Legal obligation – We may be required to process your personal information in order to comply with a legal obligation on us; for example, an obligation to disclose the information to a court or regulator, Governmental, compliance or law enforcement agency, or in connection with legal proceedings; or in order to prevent fraud and money laundering, which might involve disclosure to a fraud prevention agency. We may also be required to process certain personal information about you in order to respond to (and verify we are able to respond to) a data subject rights request that you have submitted.
9. What cookies do we use?
9.1. A cookie is a small text file placed on your computer or device. Cookies help us to:
understand browsing habits on the Site;
respond to you as an individual by tailoring our operations to your needs, likes, and dislikes by gathering and remembering information about your preferences;
monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not; and
understand the number of visitors so that we can analyse data about web traffic which helps us improve our Sites.
9.2. For more information on the cookies we use, please see our Cookie Policy.
10. What advertisements do we show on our Site and what online advertising do we use?
10.1. Advertisements on our Site - The advertisements that you see displayed on our Site are delivered on our behalf by certain third-party advertising companies. Although cookies may collect personal information about you such as unique identifiers, no personal information that directly identifies you, such as your name, address, email address, or telephone number, is used to provide this advertising. In order to display advertising most likely to be relevant to you, these third-party advertisers may place or recognise a unique cookie on your browser, either on different websites that you visit or on our Site. You will be asked to give your opt-in consent to any cookies placed for advertising purposes on our Site before any such cookies are placed, as described in our Cookie Policy. It is also possible to block cookies by adjusting your browser settings, as mentioned in our Cookie Policy.
10.2. If you would like more information about online advertisements and your choices about how this information may be used by these companies, please click here http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/your-ad-choices.
10.3. The Site has also implemented and used Display Advertising using Google Analytics which permits advertisements and remarketing to be served on third-party websites across the internet relating to a search made on the Site. The Site and third parties, including Google, use first-party cookies and third-party cookies to inform, optimise and serve such advertisements. It is also possible to block cookies by adjusting your browser settings, as mentioned in our Cookie Policy. You can also opt-out of or customise, these advertisements using the Google Ads Preferences Manager.
10.4. Online Advertisements - If you consent us contacting you for marketing purposes, we may disclose a de-identified version of your personal information such as your name, telephone number, and email address (we use a process called hashing means that the third party does not receive a plain text version of your personal information to protect your details) to third-party providers including affiliate marketing platforms like AWIN to enable them to display our marketing to you via online streaming services, search engines, or social media sites; or to other users who have similar interests or are from a similar demographic as you. See the Awin privacy policy at https://www.awin.com/gb/privacy, which explains how they collect and use your personal information.
11. How secure is our Site and what steps do we take to keep you safe?
11.1. Your personal information’s security is very important to us. This is why, where it’s appropriate, our Site uses HTTPS to help keep information about you secure. However, no data transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be totally secure. Certain information, for example, your credit card details, is encrypted to minimise the risk of interception during transit.
11.2. You may complete a registration process when you sign up to use parts of the Site. This may include the creation of a username, password, and/or other identification information. Any such details should be kept confidential by you and should not be disclosed to or shared with anyone. To protect your account, we ask you to choose a strong password to access your information on our Site. A strong password should be lengthy and include a mixture of letters and numbers. Your password can only be reset with access to the email address registered in our system.
11.3. It might sometimes be necessary for us or our suppliers to transfer your personal information outside of the UK either within the European Economic Area (EEA); or outside of the EEA. However, we will only transfer your personal information out of the UK to a jurisdiction which has not been determined by the UK government as being “adequate” for data protection purposes if we have put in place appropriate safeguards and protections as stated under UK law for example by the use of a data-transfer agreement incorporating either the UK’s international data transfer agreement or addendum which have been approved by the UK government in accordance with the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018.
12. How can you amend your preferences?
12.1. Any electronic marketing or communications from MoneySuperMarket services we send you will include clear and concise instructions to follow should you wish to unsubscribe at any time. You may also amend your marketing preferences by accessing your personal details via YourAccount/Dashboard, via the link received in emails, or by emailing us at datarequest@moneysupermarket.com.
12.2. To turn off communications from the MoneySuperMarket App, you can go to your MoneySuperMarket App settings or follow the links included at the bottom of the emails you have received (simply deleting the MoneySuperMarket App will not stop these emails).
12.3. To turn off communications from our Credit Score service, please email creditmonitor@moneysupermarket.com (simply deleting the App will not stop these emails).
12.4. Should you no longer wish to be contacted by us, you can advise us by contacting our Customers services team on customerservices@moneysupermarket.com
12.4.1. If you no longer wish to be contacted by partners for marketing purposes, please follow the instructions in their marketing communications, or consult their privacy policies for further information about unsubscribing.
12.5. Please bear in mind that it may take a little while for all marketing to stop once you either tell us you’d like to opt out of marketing or withdraw your consent. Marketing may already be in transit to you, in which case we may not be able to immediately stop it.
12.6. If you would like us to stop processing your personal information with respect to any of the services we are providing to you, please email us at datarequests@moneysupermarket.com, specifying that you no longer wish us to provide you with the relevant service or to process your personal information as part of such service.
13. Your personal information rights and how to contact us
13.1. You have certain rights under data protection legislation in relation to the personal information that we hold about you including:
13.1.1. Right to access - The right to obtain a copy of the personal information we hold about you. Sometimes this is referred to as a DSAR (data subject access request). We’ll ask you to describe the information you require, as well as letting us know about any other email addresses you’ve used on our Site, to enable us to trace your personal information. Depending on the nature of your request, we may also ask you for your full name, your date of birth, and your full address and documents to allow us to verify your identity. Requests for copies of your personal information will be dealt with within one calendar month, unless your request is complicated or if you have made a large number of requests. In these circumstances it may take us longer to deal with your request, in which case we will let you know if we need longer than one month to respond;
13.1.2. Right to correct - The right to have your personal information rectified if it is inaccurate or incomplete. Requests for us to correct your personal information will be dealt with within one month, unless your request is complicated or if you have made a large number of requests. In these circumstances, it may take us longer to deal with your request, in which case we will let you know if we need longer than one month to respond. If we believe that your personal information is accurate, we will let you know that that we will not be amending your personal information and why. As mentioned above our product partners will be acting as data controller of any of the personal information that they hold, so we will not be able rectify any such information, you should contact them directly;
13.1.3. Right to erasure of your information - The right to request that we delete or remove your personal information from our systems. Data protection legislation gives exceptions to this right which, if applicable, we will explain in our response to you;
13.1.4. Right to restrict our use of your information - In some circumstances you can ‘block’ us from using your personal information or limit the way in which we can use it, for example while we investigate a complaint that the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate;
13.1.5. Right to data portability - The right to request that we move, copy or transfer your personal information to a specified third party, or to you, in a machine-readable and structured format (e.g. CSV files). There are exemptions – for example, this only applies to personal information which has been provided directly from you, which is held in digital format, and which we process with your consent or to fulfil a contract with you;
13.1.6. Right to object - The right to object to our use of your personal information including where we use it for our legitimate interests or where we use your personal information to carry out profiling to inform our market research and customer demographics. If you raise an objection we will stop processing your personal information unless an exemption under UK data protection law applies, in which case we will let you know why we’re continuing to process your personal information;
13.2. To make an enquiry, or exercise any of your rights set out in this Privacy Policy please contact our Data Requests Team by clicking here. Alternatively, you can email us at datarequest@moneysupermarket.com.
13.3. If you are not satisfied with the way any complaint you make in relation to your personal information is handled by us then you may be able to refer your complaint to the relevant data protection regulator which in the UK is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
13.4. This Privacy Policy shall be governed and construed in all respects in accordance with the laws of England and Wales.
14. How long do we keep your personal information?
14.1. We will only hold your personal information on our systems for the period necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this Privacy Policy or until you request it is deleted (unless a longer retention period is required or permitted by law).
14.2. Generally, you can expect us to keep your personal information while you use the Site or if you have an active account with us. Where you have applied for or purchased products or services via the Site we will need to keep your personal information for longer for accounting purposes - up to six (6) years following the date on which it is provided to us.
14.3. If, having registered for any of our Services, you do not use them for a reasonable time (which may vary depending on the Service(s) you’ve registered for) we may contact you to ensure you’re still happy to receive communications from us.
14.4. If one of our product partners processes your personal information in order to provide you with a quote they will be acting as a controller but they should only hold that personal information for so long as is reasonable in relation to providing you with that quote.
14.5. If you purchase a product then the service provider will keep your personal information in accordance with their own retention periods and so you should check their own privacy policy for further information.
14.6. Even if you delete or ask us to delete your personal information it may persist on backup or archival media for legal, tax, or regulatory purposes.
15. Changes to this Privacy Policy
15.1. We reserve the right to amend or modify this Privacy Policy at any time and any changes will be published on the Site. The date of the most recent revision will appear on this page. If we make significant changes to this policy, we may also notify you by other means such as sending you an email. If you do not agree with any changes please do not continue to use the Site.
Last updated October 2024