Hammock Financial Services Ltd (“Hammock“) respects your right to privacy. This Privacy Notice explains who we are, how we collect, share and use personal information about you, and how you can exercise your privacy rights. This Privacy Notice only applies to personal information that we collect through our website at https://usehammock.com/ (“Website”), including through our web app.
If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, then please contact us using the contact details provided at the bottom of this Privacy Notice.
Hammock is the first current account made by landlords for landlords. We combine technology and current account services to automate your rent collection, simplify your bookkeeping and save you time and money.
For more information about Hammock, please see the “What is Hammock?” section of our Website.
The personal information that we may collect about you broadly falls into the following categories:
Certain parts of our Website may ask you to provide personal information voluntarily. The types of information we may ask you to provide (depending on the service you are registering for) and the reasons why may ask you to provide it, are set out below.
| Type of personal information | Why we collect it |
| Contact details | to register an account with us, to subscribe to marketing communications from us, and/or to submit enquiries to us |
| Copies of your passport, driving licence, national insurance number or other proof of identity | To verify your identity, to conduct due diligence checks, such as under anti-money laundering and sanctions legislation |
| Proof of address such as recent bills | To verify your identity, to conduct due diligence checks, such as under anti-money laundering and sanctions legislation |
| Credit reference checks | To conduct due diligence and to ensure that your credit history makes you a suitable customer for the services we provide |
| Your finances and financial history, including any outstanding county court judgments against you | To conduct due diligence and to ensure that your credit history makes you a suitable customer for the services we provide |
| Pictures or selfies | To verify your identity, as part of due diligence checks. |
| Payment details | To activate your subscription to our services, to process payments of our fees |
| Details about your properties (including address and value of the assets) and tenancies | To provide Hammock’s services such as rent collection and reconciliation |
| Transactions from current accounts and Open Banking | To provide Hammock’s services such as rent collection and reconciliation |
Where you are asked to provide further personal information, the nature of the information and the reasons why you are asked to provide it will be made clear to you at the point we request it.
Criminal Convictions data
We will also process any personal data relating to any criminal convictions you may have. This information is necessary for preventing fraud, complying with our legal obligations and managing risks.
When you visit our Website, we may collect certain information automatically from your device. In some countries, including countries in the European Economic Area and in the UK this information may be considered personal information under applicable data protection laws.
Specifically, the information we collect automatically may include information like your IP address, device type, unique device identification numbers, browser-type, broad geographic location (e.g. country or city-level location) and other technical information. We may also collect information about how your device has interacted with our Website, including the pages accessed and links clicked.
Collecting this information enables us to better understand the visitors who come to our Website, where they come from, and what content on our Website is of interest to them. We use this information for our internal analytics purposes and to improve the quality and relevance of our Website to our visitors.
Some of this information may be collected using cookies and similar tracking technology, as explained further under the heading “Cookies and similar tracking technology” below.
From time to time, we may receive personal information about you from third party sources (including credit reference agencies, financial service providers, insurance service providers, professional services providers, letting agents, providers of risk management services and banks), but only where we have checked that these third parties either have your consent or are otherwise legally permitted or required to disclose your personal information to us.
The types of information we collect from third parties include information to verify your identity. We use the information we receive from these third parties in order to screen for sanctions, politically exposed persons and to conduct anti-money laundering checks and due diligence checks, to assess your financial standing, to provide you with suitable services or products, to manage any accounts you already hold, to contact you in relation to any accounts you may have or debts you may owe, to verify your identity, age and address, to help prevent crime fraud and money laundering, to ensure that you are made offers which are suitable for your circumstances and to enable them to undertake statistical analysis, analytics and profiling and to conduct system and product testing and database processing activities such as data loading, matching and linkage.
We may disclose your personal information to the following categories of recipients:
Our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described above will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect it.
However, we will normally collect personal information from you only (i) where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you, (ii) where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your rights, or (iii) where we have your consent to do so. In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you.
If we ask you to provide personal information to comply with a legal requirement or to perform a contract with you, we will make this clear at the relevant time and advise you whether the provision of your personal information is mandatory or not (as well as of the possible consequences if you do not provide your personal information).
If we collect and use your personal information in reliance on our legitimate interests (or those of any third party), this interest will normally be to operate our platform and communicating with you as necessary to provide our services to you and for our legitimate commercial interest, for instance, when responding to your queries, improving our platform, undertaking marketing, or for the purposes of detecting or preventing illegal activities. We may have other legitimate interests and if appropriate we will make clear to you at the relevant time what those legitimate interests are.
If you have questions about or need further information concerning the legal basis on which we collect and use your personal information, please contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
We use cookies and similar tracking technology (collectively, “Cookies”) to collect and use personal information about you. For further information about the types of Cookies we use, why, and how you can control Cookies, please see our Cookie Notice.
We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the personal information that we collect and process about you. The measures we use are designed to provide a level of security appropriate to the risk of processing your personal information. Any data stored is subject to regular review against our retention policies advised by the GDPR, and is stored on encrypted volumes where access is heavily restricted by IP whitelisting. Data transmitted to us is encrypted before leaving your computer or device via a protocol called the Secure Socket Layer. Sensitive data (for example passwords) are encrypted before being stored and can never be retrieved in their raw form.
Your personal information may be transferred to, and processed in, countries other than the country in which you are resident. These countries may have data protection laws that are different to the laws of your country.
Specifically, our Website servers are located in Ireland.
However, we have taken appropriate safeguards to require that your personal information will remain protected in accordance with this Privacy Notice.
We retain personal information we collect from you where we have an ongoing legitimate business need to do so (for example, to provide you with a service you have requested or to comply with applicable legal, tax or accounting requirements).
When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymise it or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.
In some instances, our use of your personal information may result in automated decisions being taken (including profiling) that will affect which opportunities to potentially save money or benefit from new products we will offer to you.
Automated decisions mean that a decision concerning you is made automatically on the basis of a computer determination (using software algorithms), without our human review. For example, we use automated decisions to decide whether you may be eligible for financial products. We have implemented measures to safeguard the rights and interests of individuals whose personal information is subject to automated decision-making, including regular quality assurance checks of our systems to make sure that individuals are being treated fairly and not discriminated against, whether on the basis of special categories of personal data or otherwise and regular testing of algorithms used and developed by machine learning systems to prove that they are actually performing as intended, and not producing discriminatory, erroneous or unjustified results.
When we make an automated decision about you, you have the right to contest the decision, to express your point of view, and to require a human review of the decision. You can exercise this right by contact us using the contact details provided under the “How to contact us” heading below.
You have the following data protection rights:
We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights in accordance with applicable data protection laws.
We may update this Privacy Notice from time to time in response to changing legal, technical or business developments. When we update our Privacy Notice, we will take appropriate measures to inform you, consistent with the significance of the changes we make. We will obtain your consent to any material Privacy Notice changes if and where this is required by applicable data protection laws.
You can see when this Privacy Notice was last updated by checking the “last updated” date displayed at the top of this Privacy Notice.
If you have any questions or concerns about our use of your personal information, please contact us using the following details: hello@usehammock.com.
The data controller of your personal information is Hammock Financial Services Ltd.