Our Privacy Notice explains how we use your personal information and share it, where necessary, to ensure that your personal data experience is as clear and uncomplicated as possible. Ensuring that your data is safe and secure is another key priority and you will find out more about how we do this in this Privacy Notice.
Processing data is a serious business and we understand that, find out more in the information below about your data protection rights and how we collect, use, share and store your personal information. This may include personal information we already hold about now plus further personal information we might collect about you, either from you or from a third party. How we use your personal information will depend on the relationship you have with us. Please be aware that we do not knowingly sell to under 18-year old's and therefore do not process children's personal data except for the minimal data used during personalisation of goods.
Keep in the know
Under the Data Protection Laws, we are the Data Controller of your information. This means we are responsible for how your personal data is collected, stored and processed.
If you have questions about how we handle your personal information, or you feel the data we hold is incorrect, out of date or you'd like a copy of the data we hold about you, our Data Protection Team is here to help.
We understand that sometimes we may get it wrong and would love to be able to put it right as quickly as possible. If you do want to complain please in the first instance, contact either:-
Studio - If your complaint is about retail activity, such as your orders, deliveries or returns.
Studio Pay - If your complaint is about your credit account, payments, charges or an extended warranty you have purchased from us.
Details on how to contact are at the bottom of this page.
If the complaint is in relation to your personal data, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office. Further information, including contact details, is available at https://ico.org.uk
For regulated complaints only (Studio Pay)- If we cannot resolve your complaint to your satisfaction, you may be able to ask the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) to consider it. As part of our complaint handling processes, we'll make you aware of your rights of referral to FOS and how you can do that. You can contact FOS at: complaint.info@financialombudsman.org.uk
Information collected directly from you
When opening an account with us, we'll ask for various piece of information from you. This includes everything from your name and address, to your date of birth, email address and details of your account. However, there's nothing to be alarmed about! Every piece of information we take has its purpose and enables us to administer our contact and relationship with you.
We also may collect information when you are visiting our website using cookies. To access our Cooking Policy please click on the following link: Cookies, Tracking Beacons and Pixels
Information collected from third parties
We always want to ensure we are serving you the best we can if you apply for credit, this means we need to know a little more about you. To make sure we can identify your creditworthiness, we use Credit Reference Agencies. We always want to ensure that we are promoting responsible lending and preventing our customers from getting into more debt than they can afford. The information shared may include your current and past financial data together with income verification, credit commitments and income and expenditure estimates.
We will also share your data with credit and fraud prevention agencies to check accuracy and for the purpose of fraud and other illegal activity. As part of the processing of your personal data, decisions may be made by automated means. This means we may automatically decide that you pose a fraud or money laundering risk. If we, or a fraud prevention agency, determine that you pose a fraud or money laundering risk, we may refuse to provide the services or financing you have requested, or we may stop providing existing services to you. A record of any fraud or money laundering risk will be retained by the fraud prevention agencies, and may result in others refusing to provide services, financing, or employment to you.
Also please note that your account information, both positive and negative, will be shared and can be viewed by other organisations. Further details on how your information will be used by us and these fraud prevention agencies, and your data protection rights, can be found by going to www.cifas.org.uk/fpn
Once you have a Credit Account with us, we will make periodic searches of Credit Reference Agencies to manage your account on an ongoing basis. These searches will not be available to other lenders for credit assessment purposes. We will regularly carry out credit risk checks and affordability checks with these Credit Reference Agencies. However, these ongoing checks will not be recorded by the Credit Reference Agencies.
Information we share with third parties
We will only share your information in a lawful and controlled way.
If we provide you with a Credit Account, we will supply details of your account to Credit Reference Agencies which includes details of how you manage your account, if you do not pay on time, or pay less than required. Please always be aware that this information will be recorded and may affect your ability to obtain credit with us or elsewhere in the future.
The three main Credit Reference Agencies are Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. To access the Credit Reference Agency Information Notices (CRAIN) please follow the links below.
Although we would like to do most things ourselves, we do however use a variety of Service Partners to make certain services available to you. To do this, we may need to share your personal information with them which is only done when we have confirmed that they apply appropriate data protection and security controls. Furthermore, we always have appropriate contractual agreements with our partners to make sure that the necessary levels of care with your personal data is maintained at all times.
From time to time we may need to share your personal information with other third parties for a variety of reasons such as governmental bodies, regulators, law enforcement agencies, fraud prevention agencies and courts where we are required to do so. In any scenario, we'll satisfy ourselves that have a lawful basis on which to share the information.
How long do we keep your personal information for?
Don't worry, we won't keep your information forever. Different types of information can be kept for different times, and normally the longest we keep information is 6 years. However, when we are required to satisfy a regulatory request (e.g. Financial Conduct Authority), we may keep it for 12 years.
Know your rights
Whenever we process your personal information, we must have something called a "legal basis" for what we do. The different legal bases we rely on are below but for the most part we use the 'Performance of a contract' legal basis. Where we do use 'Consent' we will make sure that the opt in preference in clear and simple to see.
Performance of a contract: We must process your personal information in order to be able to provide you with one of our products or services
Consent: You have told us you are happy for us to process your personal information for a specific purpose. Where we rely on consent as the legal basis on you may withdraw that consent at any time
Legitimate interests: The processing is necessary for us to conduct our business, but not where our interests are overridden by your interests or rights
Vital interests: The processing of your personal information is necessary to protect you or someone else's life
Legal obligation: We are required to process your personal information by law
You have a number of rights under data protection law which, in certain circumstances, you may be able to exercise in relation to the personal information we process about you.
These include:
The right to be informed
The right of access
The right of rectification
The right to erasure
The right to restrict processing
The right to data portability
The right to object
Rights in relation to automated decision making and profiling
If you are seeking to exercise any of these rights, please contact Customer Services using the details at the foot of this notice. We will always try to make the processes as easy as possible for you so may respond on behalf of all the Group. Please note that we may also need to verify your identity before we can fulfil any of your rights just to be on the safe side.
Automated decisioning for credit products
When you apply for credit, we may decide whether we can lend to you automatically comparing the information you provide to use against our lending criteria. This criteria includes:
Credit score
Credit history
Employment status
Assessment of affordability
Your information will be compared against this and we may make a decision automatically about whether to offer you credit and the amount.
You do have the right to ask us to look at this manually, if you would like to discuss an application which has been completed using automated decision-making please contact Customer Services using the details at the foot of this notice.
We'll also analyse and combine the information collected (sometimes automatically) to understand the way you use your account and our services as well as what you might like and what you might do. Through our analysis we may create a profile of you to help us predict your financial behaviour and preferences so we can provide services to you ('profile information').
Why we may contact you
We'll communicate with you about products and services we are delivering using any contact details you have given us for example by post, email, text message, social media and notifications on our app or website. It's important to use that we know what our customers think so you may also be contacted for market research purposes.
Where you have given us consent to receive marketing we will also contact you, if at any time you wish to remove your consent please use the contact details below.
Finally, we send our catalogues and other paper-based information to selected customers throughout the year. If you want to stop receiving these (maybe to save some trees?) you can stop receiving them by contacting us on the details below.
If you need information on how to contact Studio or Studio Pay please use the 'Contact Us' menu on the Help & FAQ's page.
