Prospero Partners Privacy Policy

Respecting Your Privacy

We, North of the River trading as Prospero Partners, respect your personal information, and this Privacy Policy explains how we handle it. This Policy also includes our credit reporting policy, that is, it covers additional information on how we manage your personal information collected in connection with a credit application, or a credit facility. We refer to this credit-related information below as credit information.

We understand how important it is to protect your personal information. We recognise that any personal information we collect about you will only be used for the purposes we have collected it or as allowed under the law. It is important to us that you are confident that any personal information we hold about you will be treated in a way which ensures protection of your personal information.

Our commitment in respect of personal information is to abide by the Australian Privacy Principles for the protection of personal information, as set out in the Privacy Act and any other relevant law.

Personal information

When we refer to personal information we mean information from which your identity is reasonably apparent. This information may include information or an opinion about you. The personal information we hold about you may also include credit information. Credit information is information which is used to assess your eligibility to be provided with finance and may include any finance that you have outstanding, your repayment history in respect of those loans, and any defaults. Usually, credit information is exchanged between credit and finance providers and credit reporting bodies.

The kinds of personal information we may collect about you include your name, date of birth, address, contact details, account details, occupation, and any other information we made need to identify you. If you submit inquiries or information using our website we may also collect the type of finance and the amount of finance that you are interested in obtaining, and any information that you provide to us directly through our website or indirectly through use of our website. If you are applying for finance we may also collect the ages and number of your dependants and cohabitants, the length of time at your current address, your employment details and proof of earnings and expenses.

Why we collect your personal information

We collect personal information for the purposes of assessing your application for finance and managing that finance. We may also collect your personal information for the purposes of direct marketing and managing our relationship with you. From time to time we may offer you other products and services. We collect personal information on our website to send communications requested by you and to answer enquiries and provide information or advice to you.

To enable us to maintain a successful business relationship with you, we may disclose your personal information to other organisations that provide products or services used or marketed by us. We may also disclose your personal information to any other organisation that may have or is considering having an interest in our business.

How do we collect your personal information?

Unless it’s unreasonable or impracticable, we will try to collect personal information directly from you (referred to as ‘solicited information’). For this reason, it’s important that you help us to do this and keep your contact details up to date. There are several ways in which we may seek information from you. We might collect your information when you fill out a form with us, when you’ve given us a call or used our website. We also find using electronic means, such as email or SMS, a convenient way to communicate with you and to verify your details.

Sometimes, we will collect information about you from other sources as the Privacy Act 1988 permits. We will do this only if it’s reasonably necessary to do so, for example, where:

  • We collect information from third parties about the loan or lease made available to you arising out of the services we provide you

  • We can’t get hold of you and we rely on public information to update your contact details, or

  • We exchange information with your legal or financial advisers or other representatives.

How we collect and hold your credit information

We will collect your credit information while you are answering the inquiries we make of you relating to the credit assistance you seek from us. In addition to what we say above about collecting information from other sources, other main sources for collecting credit information are:

  • Your co-loan applicants or co-borrowers

  • Your guarantors/proposed guarantors

  • Your employer, accountant, real estate agent or other referees

  • Your agents and other representatives like the person who referred your business to us, your solicitors, conveyancers, and settlement agents

  • Organisations and/or other accredited brokers that help us to process credit applications

  • Organisations that check the security you are offering such as valuers

  • Bodies that issue identification documents to help us check your identity, and

  • Our service providers involved in helping us to process any application you make for credit through us.

Sharing with third parties

We may share your information with third parties in relation to services we provide to you. Those third parties may include:

  • The mortgage aggregator through whom we submit loan applications to lenders on the mortgage aggregator’s panel

  • The Australian Credit Licence holder that authorises us to engage in credit activities

  • Referrers that referred your business to us

  • Property Valuers

    Lender’s Mortgage Insurers and other loan or lease intermediaries

  • Organisations, like fraud reporting agencies, that may identify, investigate, and/or prevent fraud, suspected fraud, crimes, suspected crimes, or other misconduct

  • Government or regulatory bodies (including ASIC, AFCA, and the Australian Tax Office) as required or authorised by law

  • Guarantors and of your loan

  • Service providers, agents, contractors, and advisers that assist us to conduct our business

  • Any organisation that wishes to take an interest in our business or assets; and

  • Any third party to which you consent to us sharing your information.

Do we disclose your personal information to anyone outside Australia?

Some of the recipients to whom we disclose your personal information may be based overseas including outsourcing support solutions. Banks and other lenders may also utilise off shore third party providers that we are not aware of, however they maintain their own strong privacy policy and rigour. It is not practicable to list every country in which such recipients are located but it is likely that such countries will include the Philippines and India. We may store your information in the cloud or other types of networked or electronic storage. As electronic or networked storage can be accessed from various countries via an internet connection, it’s not always practicable to know in which country your information may be held.

Direct marketing

From time to time we may use your personal information to provide you with current information about finance, offers you may find of interest, changes to our organisation, or new products or services being offered by us or any company with whom we are associated. If you do not wish to receive marketing information, you may at any time decline to receive such information by contacting us. If the direct marketing is by email you may also use the unsubscribe function. We will not charge you for giving effect to your request and will take all reasonable steps to meet your request at the earliest possible opportunity.

Updating your personal information

It is important to us that the personal information we hold about you is accurate and up to date. During the course of our relationship with you we may ask you to inform us if any of your personal information has changed. If you wish to make any changes to your personal information, you may contact us. We will generally rely on you to ensure the information we hold about you is accurate or complete. Access and correction to your personal information We will provide you with access to the personal information we hold about you. You may request access to any of the personal information we hold about you at any time. We may charge a fee for our costs of retrieving and supplying the information to you. Depending on the type of request that you make we may respond to your request immediately, otherwise we usually respond to you within seven days of receiving your request. We may need to contact other entities to properly investigate your request. There may be situations where we are not required to provide you with access to your personal information, for example, if the information relates to existing or anticipated legal proceedings, or if your request is vexatious. An explanation will be provided to you if we deny you access to the personal information we hold about you.

If any of the personal information we hold about you is incorrect, inaccurate or out of date you may request that we correct the information. If appropriate we will correct the personal information. At the time of the request, otherwise, we will provide an initial response to you within seven days of receiving your request. Where reasonable, and after our investigation, we will provide you with details about whether we have corrected the personal information within 30 days. We may need to consult with other entities as part of our investigation. If we refuse to correct personal information we will provide you with our reasons for not correcting the information.

Using government identifiers

If we collect government identifiers, such as your tax file number, we do not use or disclose this information other than required by law. We will never use a government identifier in order to identify you.

Business without identifying you

In most circumstances it will be necessary for us to identify you in order to successfully do business with you, however, where it is lawful and practicable to do so, we will offer you the opportunity of doing business with us without providing us with personal information, for example, if you make general inquiries about interest rates or current promotional offers.

Sensitive information

We will only collect sensitive information about you with your consent. Sensitive information is personal information that includes information relating to your racial or ethnic origin, political persuasion, memberships in trade or professional associations or trade unions, sexual preferences, criminal record, or health.

How safe and secure is your personal information that we hold?

We will take reasonable steps to protect your personal information by storing it in a secure environment. We may store your personal information in paper and electronic form. We will also take reasonable steps to protect any personal information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.

Complaints

If you are dissatisfied with how we have dealt with your personal information, or you have a complaint about our compliance with the Privacy Act, you may contact us via the ‘Contact us’ on our website. Additionally Damien Colella has both his direct email and phone number listed for direct contact.

We will acknowledge your complaint within seven days. We will provide you with a decision on your complaint within 30 days. If we can’t fix things within 30 days, we’ll let you know why and how long we think it will take. We will also ask you for an extension of time to fix the matter.

If you are dissatisfied with our response you may make a complaint to the Privacy Commissioner which can be contacted on either www.oaic.gov.au or 1300 363 992.

If your complaint relates to how we handled your access and correction requests:

You may take your complaint directly to our external dispute resolution scheme or the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. You are not required to let us try to fix it first. Our external dispute resolution service provider is the Australian Financial Complaints Authority:

Online complaint form: https://ocf.afca.org.au/
Phone: 1800 931 678

Website: http://www.afca.org.au

Further information

You may request further information about the way we manage your personal information by contacting us.

Change in our privacy policy

We are constantly reviewing all of our policies and attempt to keep up to date with market expectations. Technology is constantly changing, as is the law and market place practices. As a consequence we may change this privacy policy from time to time or as the need arises. You may request this privacy policy in an alternative form.