Privacy Notice – Specialist Finance Academy

Introduction

Specialist Finance Academy, a company incorporated under the laws of the United Kingdom with a registered office at Unit H4 Daedalus Park, Daedalus Drive, Lee on the Solent, Hampshire, PO13 9FX is your trusted online academy empowering brokers to thrive in the specialist finance market by providing training, mentorship, and resources. We are committed to safeguarding your personal information. We value you as our customer, respect your privacy, and are committed to protecting it through our compliance with this policy. This Privacy Notice outlines what our purpose and practices are for collecting, processing, using, maintaining, retaining, protecting, and disclosing your information.

What Information We Collect About You

Personal Information You Give Us

Specialist Finance Academy primarily collects personal information with your permission or consent. We only collect the minimum amount of information required to conduct operational activities, which is limited to linking you with appropriate training and mentorship opportunities and resources relevant to financial markets. The personal information we collect may include:

Full name – for user registration and email communications on training waitlists and member login.
Email ID – for user registration and email communications on training waitlists and member login.
Contact number – for registration in our waitlist and member login.
Job Title – for tailored experience in the member portals for trainings
Captcha - for user verification.

Other Information We Collect

We may automatically collect the following information when you visit our website or utilise our services:

Your equipment, browsing actions, and patterns collected automatically as you navigate through our website.
Usage details, time of requests, browser types, operating system, IP addresses, and information collected through cookies, web beacons, and other tracking technologies.
Details of your visits to our website
and information collected through cookies, web beacons, and other tracking technologies.

Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to enhance your experience on our platform. The technologies we use for this automatic data collection may include:

The technologies we use for this automatic data collection may include:

Cookies: A cookie is a small piece of data, which includes an identifier made of letters and numbers that is sent by a web browser and stored on your computer. Cookies are used as a reliable mechanism to remember information about you, so your interaction with our website is seamlessly simple. Cookies typically do not contain any information that personally identify you, but personal information that we store about you may be linked to the information stored in and obtained from cookies. Please click here for details on Cookie Policy.
Flash Cookies: Certain features of our Website may use local stored objects (or Flash cookies) to collect and store information about your preferences and navigation to, from and on our Website. Flash cookies are not managed by the same browser settings as are used for browser cookies.
Web Beacons: Pages of the Website and our e-mails may contain small electronic files known as web beacons (also referred to as clear gifs. pixel tags and single-pixel gifs) that permit the Company, for example, to count users who have visited those pages or opened an e-mail and for other related website statistics (for example, recording the popularity of certain website content and verifying system and server integrity).

We use these cookies for the following purposes:

To identify you when you visit our platforms and to help you navigate through our platforms;
To help determine if you are logged into our platforms:
To store information about your preferences and to personalize our platforms for you;
To secure and protect your user account and our platforms; and
To analyse the use and performance of our platforms.

Why Do We Collect and How We Use Your Personal Information?

We use personal information for several legitimate interests, including providing and improving our services, and administering our relationship with you. The purposes for collecting personal data include:

To register and verify your account.
To respond to any queries made by you.
To connect you with prospective employers
To provide, develop, and improve our services.
To ensure security and prevent fraudulent activities.

How do we keep your information safe?

We aim to protect to protect your personal information through a system of organisational and technical security measures.

We have implemented appropriate technical and organisational security measures designed to protect the security of any personal information we process. However, despite our safeguards and efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed 100% secure, so we cannot promise nor guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorised third parties will not be able to defeat our security, and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Although we will do our best to ensure the protection of your personal information, transmission of said personal information to and from our website is at your own risk. You should only access the Website within a secure environment.

Consent Management

We value your privacy and are committed to managing your personal data transparently and responsibly. Our platform requires your explicit consent to process certain categories of personal information for specified purposes. Below, we outline how we manage consent:

Opt-In Consent: We will only process your personal data for purposes such as marketing communications, analytics, or personalised services when you have explicitly opted in. You will be provided with clear options to select your preferences at the point of data collection.
Revoking Consent: You have the right to withdraw your consent at any time. If you wish to do so, you can update your preferences in your account settings or contact us directly at [insert contact email]. Revoking your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing carried out before the withdrawal.
Third-Party Sharing: We will only share your data with third parties when you have explicitly opted in and provided your consent for such sharing or when it is necessary to fulfill a contract with you, or as required by law.

To fulfil our services for you we use an essential third-party service provider for web hosting and payment processing, which is necessary for the legitimate business purpose of delivering our services to you. This provider process your data solely for these purposes, in compliance with applicable data protection laws, and we ensure that they implement appropriate safeguards to protect your data.

How to Opt Out?

You have the right to opt out of receiving communications from us. You can exercise this right by:

Email: Clicking on the unsubscribe link provided in the email.
Website: Using the “opt out” option provided on the website.
Contacting Us: Using the contact details provided in the section 'How Do You Contact Us?'

Who Might We Share This Information With?

We may disclose personal information that we collect, or you provide, as described in this privacy notice:

Within Specialist Finance Academy: We may share your personal information with any member of Specialist Finance Academy, including subsidiaries, affiliates, and holding companies.
With Third-Party Service Providers: We may use carefully selected third parties to perform services on our behalf, such as cloud service providers, IT service providers, and others to host our websites/platforms and provide you with full accessibility/usability to our services.
With Regulators and Law Enforcement Agencies: Where required or permitted by law.

Third-party Services

We engage third-party service providers to assist with certain aspects of our services, including website hosting and payment processing. Specifically, we use Kajabi Creator Platform for our website hosting and payment processing services.
Payment Information such as card details are only used to process payments through authorized payment gateways for payment management and obtaining our membership fees. To ensure your data is secure we ensure that Kajabi’s safeguards align with our own commitment to protecting your privacy and personal data.
When you make a purchase on our website, we do not store nor process your card data. Instead, our service provider, Kajabi processes the payment information solely for the purpose of completing your transaction without storage of your card details nor personal data. This is ensured through Kajabi’s compliance and commitment to legal and regulatory requirements, industry standards and best practices such as compliance with The Strong Customer Authentication (SCA), a European regulatory requirement designed to safeguard your personal and payment information.
For more details on Kajabi’s privacy practices and their data protection measures, please refer to their privacy notice below:

https://legal.kajabi.com/policies/privacy

Third-party data sharing safeguards

We take the protection of your personal data seriously and ensure that all third parties with whom we share your data are bound by strict contractual obligations in line with the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
GDPR Compliance - Any third parties that process your data on our behalf are required to adhere to GDPR standards, ensuring that your personal data is handled lawfully, securely, and transparently.
Data Processing Agreements - We have entered into comprehensive Data Processing Agreements (DPAs) with all third-party service providers. These agreements outline their obligations to protect your personal data, restrict its use to specified purposes, and ensure its confidentiality.
Security Measures - Third parties are required to implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to safeguard your data against unauthorized access, loss, or misuse.
Restricted Sharing - We only share your personal data with third parties when necessary for the delivery of our services or when required by law. No third party may use your data for purposes outside those explicitly agreed upon.
Monitoring and Audits - We conduct regular reviews and audits to ensure our third-party partners maintain GDPR compliance and uphold the highest standards of data protection.

Data Storage and International Transfers

The personal information that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (EEA). We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your personal information is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy notice and applicable data protection laws. We only share your information cross-border to facilitate training programs and mentorship opportunities, with your explicit consent and under stringent security measures.

Data Retention

We retain personal information for as long as is necessary to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected, including to satisfy any legal, accounting, or reporting requirements. When data is no longer required, it is securely deleted.

We have implemented adequate safeguards to protect and secure the information involved in such transfers. Where we transfer personal information outside of the UK, we either transfer personal information to countries that provide an adequate level of protection (as determined by the European Commission) or we have appropriate safeguards in place. Appropriate safeguards to cover these transfers are in the form of standard contractual/data protection clauses adopted by the European Commission. If you would like more information on protection measures and transfer mechanisms, please contact us using the details provided in Section - ‘How do you contact us?’.

Further, we provide you the right to delete your profile, and in such instances, all your data will be removed from our databases upon the deletion of your profile.

Data Security

Your personal data security is an important concern to us. We use industry-standard security measures to protect your information, including firewalls and Transport Security Layer (TLS) encryption. We have implemented and maintained appropriate technical and organizational security measures, policies, and procedures to protect your personal information from accidental loss, unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure.

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers behind firewalls. All payment transactions are encrypted using TLS technology. Ex: Measures we take includes:

Placing confidentiality requirements on our staff and service providers;
Restriction of access to your personal information to employees and third parties strictly on a need-to-know basis, such as to respond to your enquiry or request;
Destroying or anonymising personal information if it is no longer needed for the purposes for which it was collected; and
Using secure communication channels for transmitting personal data.

Your Rights

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have certain rights regarding your personal information. These rights may include:

The Right to Access: Obtain confirmation as to whether we process personal data about you, receive a copy of your personal data, and obtain information about how and why we process your data.
The Right to Rectification: Request for your personal data to be amended or rectified where it is inaccurate and to have incomplete personal data completed.
The Right to Restrict Processing: Restrict our processing of your personal data in certain circumstances.
The Right to Erasure: Obtain deletion of your personal data in specific situations.
The Right to Object: Object to our processing of your personal data in specific situations.
The Right to Data Portability: Receive your personal data in a structured, commonly used, and machine-readable format, and have the right to transmit those data to another controller.
The Right to Withdraw Consent: Withdraw consent at any time where we process personal data based on consent.

Updates on Policy

We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or legal requirements. We will notify you of any significant changes by posting the updated notice on our website and indicating the effective date.

Our Privacy Notice was last updated in January 2025 and we reserve the right to make changes to this Notice at any time and for any reason. We will alert you about any changes by updating the “Last Updated” date of this Privacy Notice. Any changes or modifications will be effective immediately upon posting the updated Privacy Notice on this website, and you waive the right to receive specific notice of each such change or modification.

You are encouraged to periodically review this Privacy Notice to stay informed of updates. You will be deemed to have been made aware of, will be subject to, and will be deemed to have accepted the changes in any revised Privacy Policy by your continued use of the Website after the date such revised Privacy Notice is posted.

How Do You Contact Us?

For any queries related to this policy, you can contact our Data Privacy Office in one of the following ways:

Email: [email protected]
Phone: 07824490993

Thank you for trusting Specialist Finance Academy with your personal information. Your privacy is our priority.

How can you review, update or delete the data we collect from you?

Based on the applicable laws of your country, you may have the right to request access to the personal information we collect from you, change that information or delete it in circumstances. To request review, update, or delete your personal information, please visit: https://specialistfinanceacademy.co.uk