Privacy Policy

This Notice (together with our terms of use and any other documents referred to within) explains the personal data we collect about you, how and why we use it, who we disclose it to, and how we protect your privacy. This notice does not form part of our client agreement with you.

Please read the following carefully to understand our views and practices regarding your personal data and how we will treat it.

1. Who is responsible for your personal data

For the purpose of the Data Protection Act 1998 (the “Act”), EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”), PCI-DSS, and European data protection legislation, the data controller is DavidsonMorris. We control the ways your personal data are collected and the purposes for which your personal data are used by DavidsonMorris.

Our Privacy Notice applies to the personal data that DavidsonMorris collects and uses.

References in this Privacy Notice to DavidsonMorris, “we”, “us” or “our” mean DavidsonMorris Limited, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 6183275 and whose registered office is at Level 30, The Leadenhall Building, 122 Leadenhall Street, London EC3V 4AB.

2. Purpose and lawful basis for processing your data

We process your personal data for the following purposes:

1. To carry out our obligations arising from any contracts entered into between you and us.
2. To comply with legal and regulatory obligations.
3. For the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims or proceedings.
4. For legitimate business purposes:
a. To ensure that content from www.davidsonmorris.com (“our website”) is presented in the most effective manner for you and for your device.
b. To provide you with information, products or services that you request from us or which we feel may interest you, where you have consented to be contacted for such purposes.
c. To allow you to participate in interactive features of our service, when you choose to do so.
d. To notify you about changes to our service.

These purposes allow DavidsonMorris to seek your consent to process your data for communication, education and marketing purposes (GDPR 1).

Without your explicit consent, DavidsonMorris will not process your data for these purposes.

The purpose and lawful basis for processing your data may change from time to time, where this Notice will be updated.

3. Consent

Your consent will be an explicit action from 25th May 2018.

Because of the need for consent we will not use defaulted opt-in checkboxes or include your personal data for communication and marketing purposes where you have asked only for communications relating to service delivery or in the performance of contractual obligations.

The length of time we retain your personal data will depend on any legal obligations we have, the nature of any contracts we have in place with you, the existence of your consent or our legitimate interests as a business.

We will retain your personal data for as long as we need it in order to fulfil our purposes as set out in this Privacy Notice or in order to comply with the law.

We will not contact you if you have withdrawn consent, but you can grant or withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us.

We will also include the opportunity to unsubscribe or withdraw consent on all marketing emails.

4. Personal data we collect about you

When using the term “personal data” in our Privacy Notice, we mean information that relates to you and allows us to identify you, either directly or in combination with other information that we may hold.

We collect some personal data from you, for example when you use our website, or use our services or contact us. We may collect and process the following categories of information about you:

a) Name and surname and your contact details (email address, telephone number and postal address): When you purchase our services or enquire about our services
b) Personal information which may include special categories of data: Provided to us or generated by us in the course or providing services to you:

I. Date of birth, gender and/or age, your nationality and/or citizenship status
II. National Insurance number
III. Bank account details and tax status information
IV. Copies of passports and visas
V. Photographs
VI. Client engagement information
VII. Career history including work/engagement/project/employment records, project 
details, job titles, work history, working hours, holidays, training records and 
professional memberships
VIII. Details of the professional projects/engagements you are or have been involved in
IX. Health information including mental health
X. Details of your assets and beneficiaries
XI. Your marital status, family, lifestyle or social circumstances and other affairs, if 
relevant to the business relationship
XII. Information about criminal convictions or offences

c) Identification and background information: Provided by you or collected as part of our business acceptance processes.
d) Information about your transactions, including your payment details: When you make payment for our services.
e) The communications you exchange with us: When you contact DavidsonMorris or you are contacted by us.
f) Technical information, such as information from your visits to our website or in relation to materials and communications we send to you electronically: When you navigate on our website or interact with our communications.
g) Information you provide to us for the purposes of attending meetings and events, including access and dietary requirements: When you register to attend our events
h) Your social media account ID: When you interact with us on social media or when we target social media posts.
i) Your posts and messages on social media directed to us: When you interact with us on social media.
j) Your feedback: When you reply to our requests for feedback or participate in our client surveys.
k) Any other information relating to you which you may provide to us.

Change of purpose

We will only use your personal data for those situations listed above, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal data for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal basis which allows us to do so.

Please note that we may process your personal data without your knowledge or consent, where this is required or permitted by law.

Sensitive personal data

Information that could reveal your racial or ethnic origin, physical or mental health, religious beliefs or alleged commission or conviction of criminal offences is considered “sensitive personal data” under the UK Data Protection Act 1998 and other data protection laws, which we do not collect via our website.

5. How and why we use your personal data

We use your personal data for the following purposes:

a) To perform our services

We use your information to perform our services in relation to your instruction or enquiry:
I. To make a decision about whether we take you on as a client
II. Determining the terms of our client agreement with you
III. Keeping you up to date and reporting to you
IV. To advise you
V. To create a client profile on our database
VI. Making arrangements for the termination of any client relationship

b) To communicate with you and manage our relationship with you
We will need to contact you by email and/or telephone in the course of delivering our service to meet our contractual obligations. We may also need to contact you for administrative or operational reasons.

Please be aware that these communications are not made for marketing purposes and as such, you will continue to receive them even if you opt-out from receiving marketing communications.

We may also use your personal data if we contact you after you have sent us a request, filled in a web-form through our website or contacted us on social media.

Your opinion is very important to us, so we may send you an email to seek your feedback.

We will use the communications you exchange with us and the feedback you may provide in order to manage our relationship with you as our client and to improve our services and experiences for clients.

c) To personalise and improve your customer experience
We may use your personal data in order to tailor our services to your needs and preferences and to provide you with a personalised client experience.

We may also collect information on how you use our website, which pages of our website you visit most, which services you search for to understand what you like. We may use this information to tailor the content and offers that you see on our website and, if you have agreed to receiving marketing communications, to send you relevant messages that we think you will like.

d) To inform you about our news and offers that you may like
We may send you marketing communications, if you have indicated that you are happy to receive these and you explicitly agree to receive such communications. You can also request us to send you marketing communications through managing your preferences in your account.

If you are happy to receive marketing communications, we will provide you with news from us such as new products that you may be interested in or services that you may like.

Please note that we do not share your contact details and other personal data with other companies for marketing purposes, unless we have obtained your consent to do so.

If you do not want to receive marketing communications from us, you can simply tell us so by clicking the relevant box on our preference form.

You can also choose to opt out from receiving marketing communications at any time, by clicking on the relevant unsubscribe link at the bottom of any marketing related email you may receive from us.

If you prefer, you can express your preference to not receive marketing communications by emailing us, info@davidsonmorris.com, calling us (020 7494 0118) or by using our website contact form. We ask that you allow 28 working days to complete any unsubscribe request.

e) To improve our services, fulfil our administrative purposes and protect our business interests

The business purposes for which we will use your information include accounting, billing and audit, credit or other payment card verification, fraud screening, security and legal purposes, statistical and marketing analysis, systems testing, maintenance and development such as:

I. Business management and planning
II. Dealing with legal disputes involving you and/or our employees
III. Updating client records
IV. To monitor and keep records of our communications with you and our staff
V. For market research and analysis and developing statistics

f) To comply with our legal obligations
For example, our obligations for accounting and auditing of our business
to comply with any obligations under employment law and to provide your information to local police agencies.

6. How long do we retain personal data for?

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.

In some circumstances we may anonymise your personal data so that it can no longer be associated with you, in which case we may use such information without further notice to you.

Once you are no longer a client, we will retain your personal data in accordance with our data retention policy and applicable laws and regulations.

7. Requesting access to your data

You have a right to request access to the personal data that we hold about you. This could include information relating to service purchases.

If you have questions in relation to your personal data, please contact us.

8. Your Right to be Forgotten

You have a right to be forgotten and have data erased and / or stop being processed where the personal data is no longer necessary for the purpose of collection, you withdraw consent, when you object to the processing or to comply with a legal obligation.

We will not erase your records as we need to maintain your transactional data for our legal obligations to the local tax and revenue authorities. The records will be anonymised to overwrite your personal data with fictional names, addresses and emails, making it impossible to restore a single client.

We have a number of security and governance protections in place that will be excluded from your right to be forgotten:

• Encrypted system backups, held for up to 10 years.
• Our anti-spam and email gateway. We maintain email archiving for security reasons, and your info may be kept in this archive. Access to this gateway is limited to named data controllers for DavidsonMorris.

If you have questions in relation to your personal data, please contact us.

9. Right to restrict processing

You have a right for your personal data to be stored but not processed. This is achieved through the withdrawal of consent.

If you have questions in relation to your personal data, please contact us.

10. Security of your personal data

We are committed to taking appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data against unauthorised or unlawful processing and against accidental loss, destruction or damage to personal data. When you provide your personal data through our website or systems, this information is transmitted across the internet securely using high-grade encryption.

The information that you provide to us will be held in our systems, which are located on our premises or those of an appointed third party. We may also allow access to your information by other third parties who act for us for the purposes described in this Privacy Notice or for other purposes approved by you.

We are based in the UK, but the data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the UK and European Economic Area (“European Area”). It may also be processed by staff or suppliers operating outside the European Area who work for us or for one of our suppliers. By submitting your personal data, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing. We will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy policy.

All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. Any payment transactions will be encrypted using SSL technology.

Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to the site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorised access.

We will retain your personal data for as long as we need it in order to fulfil our purposes set out in this Privacy Notice or in order to comply with the law.

11. Cookies and other tracking technologies

In order to improve our services, to provide you with more relevant content and to analyse how visitors use our website, we may use technologies, such as cookies or tracking software. Please be aware that in most cases we will not be able to identify you from the information we collect using these technologies.

You can delete cookies if you wish; while certain cookies are necessary for viewing and navigating on our website, most of the features will be still accessible without cookies. For more information on how we use cookies and how you can remove them, read our Cookies Notice.

12. Sharing your personal data

We may share your personal information with certain trusted third parties in accordance with contractual arrangements in place with them, including:

• Any member of our group, which means our subsidiaries, our ultimate holding company and its subsidiaries, as defined in section 1159 of the UK Companies Act 2006
• Our professional advisers and auditors
• Suppliers to whom we outsource certain support services such as word processing, translation, photocopying and document review
• IT service providers
• Third parties engaged in the course of the services we provide to clients and with their prior consent
• Third parties involved in hosting or organising events or seminars

Where necessary, or for the reasons set out in this Notice, personal information may also be shared with regulatory authorities, courts, tribunals, government agencies and law enforcement agencies.  While it is unlikely, we may be required to disclose your information to comply with legal or regulatory requirements. We will use reasonable endeavours to notify you before we do this, unless we are legally restricted from doing so.

We may disclose your personal information to third parties in the event that we sell or buy any business or assets, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets, and if DavidsonMorris Limited or substantially all of its assets are acquired by a third party, in which case personal data held by it about its customers will be one of the transferred assets.

DavidsonMorris may use social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  If you use these services, you should review their privacy Notice for more information on how they deal with your personal information.

We do not sell, rent or otherwise make personal information commercially available to any third party, except with your prior permission.

Through our website we provide links to third party websites which are subject to separate Privacy Polices. Please be aware that this Privacy Notice does not apply to such websites and DavidsonMorris is not responsible for your information that third parties may collect through these websites.

13. Data Protection Officer

We have not appointed a DPO to oversee compliance with this Privacy Notice. If you have any questions about this Privacy Notice or how we handle your personal data, please contact your usual contact at our office. You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority for data protection issues.

14. Call Recording 

When you contact us via phone, please be aware that your call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes to ensure the quality of our service, train our staff and maintain standards of customer care.

We are committed to protecting your privacy and ensuring that your personal data is handled in compliance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). All recorded calls are securely stored and access to them is restricted to authorised personnel only. Call recordings are retained for a period necessary to fulfil the purposes outlined in this policy, after which they will be securely deleted.

You have the right to request access to any recordings of your calls. Please contact us using the details provided in this policy to make such a request.

If you prefer not to have your call recorded, you may inform the representative at the beginning of the call. Alternatively, you may choose to contact us via other means such as email or our website contact form.

15. Updates to our privacy notice

We may make changes to this Privacy Notice from time to time. We will publish on our website any new version of this Notice.

16. Contact information

Please contact us with any questions, comments and requests regarding this Privacy Notice.