Privacy Policy

We take data protection and your privacy very seriously at MoneySpider. Here’s how we handle your information

Last updated: 9th December, 2024

This privacy notice aims to give you information on how MoneySpider collects and processes your personal data through your use of this website, including any data you may provide when you submit our online contact form.

It is important that you read this privacy notice so that you are fully aware of how and why we are using your data.

1 Who We Are

1.1 MoneySpider is a trading style of Visionary Markets Ltd, company registration number 07293351, which is the data controller and responsible for your personal data (collectively referred to as “Visionary Markets”, “Visionary Markets Ltd”, “MoneySpider”, “moneyspider.com”, “we”, “us” or “our” in this privacy notice).

1.2 We are a registered data controller with the Information Commissioner’s Office, registration number Z2311642.

1.3 Contact details:

Name: Visionary Markets Ltd
Email address: [email protected]
Postal address: Visionary Markets Ltd, Maghull Business Centre, 1 Liverpool Road North, Maghull, Merseyside, L31 2HB

2 Data We Collect

Personal data, or personal information, means any information about an individual from which that person can be identified. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data).

2.1 We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you which we have grouped together as follows:

  • Identity Data includes first name and last name.
  • Contact Data includes address, email address and telephone number(s).
  • Technical Data includes internet protocol (IP) address, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform and other technology on the devices you use to access this website.
  • Product Data includes form responses (the data entered and selected within our online contact form).
  • Usage Data includes information about how you use our website.

2.2 We also collect, use and share Aggregated Data such as statistical or demographic data for any purpose. Aggregated Data may be derived from your personal data but is not considered personal data in law as this data does not directly or indirectly reveal your identity. For example, we may aggregate your Usage Data to calculate the percentage of users accessing a specific website feature. However, if we combine or connect Aggregated Data with your personal data so that it can directly or indirectly identify you, we treat the combined data as personal data which will be used in accordance with this privacy notice.

3 How We Collect Your Data

We use different methods to collect data from and about you including through:

3.1 Direct interactions. You may give us your Identity, Contact and Marketing and Communications Data by filling in forms (including our online insurance quote form) or by corresponding with us by post, phone, email or otherwise.

3.2 Automated technologies or interactions. As you interact with our website, we may automatically collect Technical Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this personal data by using cookies, pixels, server logs and other similar technologies. Please see our cookie policy for further details.

3.3 Technical Data from analytics providers such as Google.

4 How We Use Your Data

We use your personal information for the following purposes:

4.1 For the management of our site and other services

4.2 Verifying your identity, managing, running and administering your account if you choose to set up a MoneySpider account.

4.3 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.

4.4 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.

4.5 To track sales, which may involve product partners sharing data with us relating to the product(s) you have purchased, this may involve us placing “cookies” or other tracking technologies on our site.

4.6 To fulfil offers you are eligible for or have applied for through the site, for example if you qualify for our rewards platform. Where we use third parties to help us to fulfil offers, incentives and rewards, we may also need to share your personal information with them. This will also be detailed in the relevant terms and conditions for our rewards platform.

4.7 By matching our data with data from other sources including to validate your information and make our services easy to use.

4.8 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 to make our services as easy to use as possible. For example, you may be required to provide your address when using the services. 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.

4.9 When you use our eligibility checker services (for example on our loan 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 third-party loan provider who may perform a ‘soft’ credit check as part of the quotes process.

4.10 To communicate with you, including some or all of the following:

  • 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 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. This won’t affect any communications that we need to send you for the purpose of being able to provide our services.
  • 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 so that you have a record of it.

4.11 To personalise and improve aspects of our Services including:

  • 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. These recommendations and insights might either be provided via direct marketing communications, or through the display of information on our site.

4.12 For research, such as analysing market trends and customer demographics including:

  • 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.

4.13 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 to prevent fraud and money laundering, which might involve disclosure to a fraud prevention agency.

4.14 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.

5 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:

5.1 Where we need to effectively perform the service you require.

5.2 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, 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 to enter into a contract with you.

5.3 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 our cookie policy); and (ii) consenting to conduct certain “audience” based targeting services by social media platform providers.

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).

5.4 – 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:

  • 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 to improve our Services, for example:
    • informing you of your annual renewal quotes via your account dashboard;
    • if you have logged into our Site or created an account 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;
    • 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;
    • 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 Your Account/Dashboard to enable you to quickly switch energy suppliers when your tariff ends; and
  • marketing: to tell you about products, services and insights which we think may be of interest to you, to develop marketing content and enhance our marketing strategies. We won’t send you marketing communications if you tell us not to;
  • 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;
  • for market research, analysis and product improvement. 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;
  • 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: [email protected] if you wish to exercise this right.

5.5 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 to respond to (and verify we are able to respond to) a data subject rights request that you have submitted.

6 Sharing of Your Personal Data

6.1 We may have to share your personal data with the parties set out below for the purposes set out in our lawful basis for the processing of your general person data:

  • FCA authorised Financial Technology (FinTech) companies acting as data processors, joint data controllers or independent data controllers who provide the introduction to FCA authorised insurers/brokers by means of IT and system services which may be based on the data you have provided.
  • FCA authorised mortgage brokers acting as data processors, joint data controllers or independent data controllers to provide the services required.
  • Propello Cloud Limited – To provide the rewards platform services

6.2 We also share your data with the following, to provide the quotation and advice services:

  • Fluent Money Ltd – To provide mortgage quotes and brokering services
  • Monevo Limited – To provide the loan quote service
  • Seopa Ltd – To provide the quote services for various products offered on our site
  • Twenty7Tec Group Ltd – To provide the mortgage quote service

7 Your Legal Rights and Your Data

Under certain circumstances, you have rights under data protection laws in relation to your personal data. You have the right to:

7.1 Request access to your personal data (commonly known as a “data subject access request”). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.

7.2 Request correction of the personal data that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate data we hold about you corrected, though we may need to verify the accuracy of the new data you provide to us.

7.3 Request erasure of your personal data. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal data where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal data where you have successfully exercised your right to object to processing (see below), where we may have processed your information unlawfully or where we are required to erase your personal data to comply with local law.

7.4 Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation which makes you want to object to processing on this ground as you feel it impacts on your fundamental rights and freedoms. You also have the right to object where we are processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. In some cases, we may demonstrate that we have compelling legitimate grounds to process your information which override your rights and freedoms.

7.5 Request restriction of processing your personal data. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of your personal data in the following scenarios: (a) if you want us to establish the data’s accuracy; (b) where our use of the data is unlawful but you do not want us to erase it; (c) where you need us to hold the data even if we no longer require it as you need it to establish, exercise or defend legal claims; or (d) you have objected to our use of your data but we need to verify whether we have overriding legitimate grounds to use it.

7.6 Request transfer of your personal data to you or to a third party. We will provide to you, or a third party you have chosen, your personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. Note that this right only applies to automated information which you initially provided consent for us to use or where we used the information to perform a contract with you.

To exercise all relevant rights, queries or complaints, please contact us at [email protected] to discuss your concerns.

Following this, if you are still dissatisfied, you are able to contact the Information Commissioner’s Office directly at https://ico.org.uk/

8 Data Security

8.1 We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal data to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal data on our instructions, and they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

8.2 We have put in place procedures to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

9 Data Retention

9.1 We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements.

9.2 To determine the appropriate retention period for personal data, we consider the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the personal data, the potential risk of harm from unauthorised use or disclosure of your personal data, the purposes for which we process your personal data and whether we can achieve those purposes through other means, and the applicable legal requirements.

10 Data Transfers to Third Countries

10.1 The data we collect from you may, on occasion, be stored and/or processed at a destination outside the European Economic Area (EEA). It may also be processed by organisations operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers. 10.2 These organisations may be engaged in the fulfilment of your request, order or reservation, and the provision of support services.

10.3 Where we use certain service providers, we may use specific contracts approved by the European Commission which give personal data the same protection it has in Europe.

10.4 Where we use providers based in the US, we may transfer data to them if they are part of the Privacy Shield which requires them to provide similar protection to personal data shared between the Europe and the US.

10.5 We will take steps reasonably necessary to ensure there is an adequate level of protection of your data and that your data is treated securely and in accordance with our Privacy Policy.