Privacy & Cookies

Privacy Policy

 

elitecfd Limited and elitecfd Europe Limited (“we”, “us”, or “our”) recognise and value the trust that you place in us when interacting with us. This privacy policy (the “Privacy Policy”) explains how we use your personal data (the “Personal Data”), describes the categories of Personal Data we process and for what purposes and explains your data protection rights and how to exercise them.

As elitecfd Limited is established in the United Kingdom (“UK”) but operates as a global business, it is subject to (i) the UK General Data Protection Regulation, as supplemented by the Data Protection Act 2018 and (ii) the EU General Data Protection Regulation. elitecfd Europe Limited is subject to the EU General Data Protection Regulation and the relevant data protection legislation applicable in Malta.

We take your privacy seriously and we are committed to collecting and using your Personal Data fairly and in accordance with the requirements of the applicable data protection legislation.

 

1.    IMPORTANT INFORMATION AND WHO WE ARE

Depending on the Alpha entity you are facing, elitecfd Limited or elitecfd Europe Limited will be the data controller and will be responsible for your Personal Data.

 

  • elitecfd Limited’s registered office is at Brunel Building, 2 Canalside Walk, London, W2 1DG, and we are authorised and regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority.
  • elitecfd Europe Limited’s registered office is at 171, Old Bakery Street, Valletta VLT 1455, Malta, and we are authorised and regulated in Malta by the Malta Financial Services Authority.
  • If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our data protection practices, please contact us by emailing dataprotection@alphafx.co.uk.

 

2.    THE DATA WE COLLECT ABOUT YOU

  • “Personal Data” means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.  We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of Personal Data about you, as follows:
  • Identity data including your name, date of birth, place of birth, gender, nationality, copies of your passport and/or driving licence, and, where offered to us, data relating to your family, education and employment background.
  • Contact data including your billing/registered address, email address and telephone number.
  • Client-related data including business information, relationship with you (or with a client of whom you are an employee or other staff member), information about any shareholdings, business contact details.
  • Financial data including your bank account details, your tax identification number and your fiscal residence.
  • Other background identification data including evidence of beneficial ownership and source of funds to comply with our client due diligence, know your customer (“KYC”) and anti-money laundering regulations and collected as part of our client acceptance and ongoing monitoring procedures as required by law.
  • Usage data including data obtained through your use of our website or any electronic system or interface that we provide to you through our website (the “Online Platform”) as well as data collected through cookies, server logs and other similar tracking technologies.

We may process your sensitive data, if:

  • we have your explicit consent; or
  • we are required or allowed to do so by applicable law and regulation, for examples to comply with KYC and anti-money laundering regulations.

We may collect data relating to criminal offences subject to compliance with the strict conditions set out under the applicable data protection legislation.

We digitally record all telephone conversations.

 

3.    HOW IS YOUR PERSONAL DATA COLLECTED?

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

  • direct interactions with you. In those cases, it is your responsibility to ensure that all such Personal Data is complete in all material respects and not misleading;
  • publications/databases made available by official authorities;
  • our corporate clients, prospects, or service providers;
  • websites/social media pages containing information made public by you (e.g. your own website or social media);
  • databases made publicly available by third parties; and
  • automated technologies or interactions, for example through your use of our website or Online Platform. We collect this Personal Data by using cookies, server logs and other similar tracking technologies. Please see our Cookie Policy for further details.

We may also collect information about you even if you do not have a direct relationship with us. This may for example happen when your contact details are provided to us by one of our clients, prospects and if you are (by way of example and without limitation) a legal representative, an ultimate beneficial owner, a shareholder, an employee or a staff member of that client or prospect.

 

4.    HOW WE USE YOUR PERSONAL DATA

We will only use your Personal Data for the following purposes:

  • To provide foreign exchange services, payment services and related services to you (or to a client of whom you are an employee or other staff member), which includes providing you with information regarding our services, assisting you and answering your requests and having proof of transactions;
  • to discharge our legal and regulatory obligations;
  • to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights or for the purpose of legal proceedings;
  • to record and monitor your use of our website, or our Online Platform or our other online services for our business purposes which may include analysis of usage, measurement of site performance and generation of marketing reports;
  • in the event that we buy or sell any business or assets, or substantially all of our assets are acquired by a third party, we may share your Personal Data to the prospective buyer, and in the event of an acquisition, Personal Data held by us about our clients will be one of the transferred assets;
  • to engage in marketing and business development activity in relation to our services, including to undertake business/market research, survey and analysis;
  • for managing the operation of our website, our Online Platform and our business;
  • to look into any complaints or queries you may have; and
  • to prevent and respond to actual or potential fraud or illegal activities.

In addition, we will only process your Personal Data where we have a lawful basis for doing so. Our lawful basis will be one or more of the following:

 

  • Consent – insofar as you have given us your consent for the processing of Personal Data, such consent will serve as a legal basis for the processing; You can withdraw your consent at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal. In some cases, we may be entitled despite your withdrawal to continue to process your personal data on a different legal basis – to perform a contract, for example.
  • Performance of a contract or payment instruction by you – we may need to collect and use your Personal Data for the performance of a contract to which you are party or in order to take steps at your request prior to entering a contract or to process a payment instruction from you.
  • Legitimate interests – we may use your Personal Data as is necessary for the purposes of pursuing our legitimate interests (this includes carrying out the business of providing foreign exchange services, payment services and related services and pursuing our general business interests) where your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
  • Compliance with our legal obligations – we may use your Personal Data as necessary to comply with applicable law and regulations, including to comply with our client due diligence, know your customer (“KYC”) and anti-money laundering regulations.

Where we need to collect Personal Data by law or applicable regulations or under the terms of a contract we have with you and you fail to provide the Personal Data when requested, we may not be able to perform the contract we have or are trying to enter into with you (for example, to provide you with services). In this case, we may have to decline to provide or receive the relevant services, but we will notify you if this is the case at the time the Personal Data is collected.

 

5.    DISCLOSURES OF YOUR PERSONAL DATA

In providing services to our clients and in complying with our legal obligations, we may share your Personal Data, insofar as we are permitted by the applicable data protection legislation to do so, with the following:

  • third party agents/suppliers or contractors, bound by obligations of confidentiality, in connection with the processing of your Personal Data for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. This may include, but is not limited to, IT service providers such as cloud providers of software as a service, data room providers and providers of our IT servers and communications service providers; and our professional advisors (legal, auditing or other special services provided by lawyers, notaries, trustees, company auditors or other professional advisors);
  • third parties relevant to the services that we provide. This may include, but is not limited to, counterparties to transactions, other professional service providers, financial institutions, regulators, authorities, governmental institutions and stock exchanges; and/or
  • to the extent required by law, regulation or court order, for example, if we are under a duty to disclose your Personal Data in order to comply with any legal obligation.

The recipients referred to above may be located outside the jurisdiction in which you are located or in which Alpha provides the services. See the section on “Sending Personal Data outside the UK and the EEA” below for more information.

 

6.    SENDING PERSONAL DATA OUTSIDE THE UK AND THE EEA

We may need to transfer your Personal Data to a country outside the UK or outside the European Economic Area (the “EEA”), such country being referred to as a “third country”. Where this is the case, we will make sure that your Personal Data is protected to the same extent as in the UK and EEA by implementing one of the following measures:

  • we will transfer Personal Data to a third country with privacy laws that give the same levels of protection as the UK and EEA, as evidenced by a so-called “adequacy decision” adopted by the competent authorities;
  • in the absence of an adequacy decision, we will put in place appropriate safeguards such as standard contractual clauses approved for use by the Information Commissioner’s Office or by the European Commission, as applicable.

 

7.    PERSONAL DATA SECURITY

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 if they are subject to a duty of confidentiality.

 

8.    PERSONAL DATA RETENTION

We will retain your Personal Data for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for, including for the purposes of satisfying any legal, regulatory, tax, accounting or reporting requirements.

 

We may retain your Personal Data for a longer period (i) to comply with our record retention requirements under applicable law and regulations, (ii) to defend or bring any existing or potential legal claims, (iii) to deal with any future complaints regarding the services we provided and (iv) to maintain business records for analysis and/or audit purposes.

 

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, regulatory, tax, accounting or other requirements.

 

9.    YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS

In accordance with the applicable data protection legislation, and within the limits thereof, you have, in relation to your Personal Data, the following rights:

  • Right of access: you can ask us to provide you with a copy of the Personal Data that we hold about you.
  • Right to rectification: if you believe any of your Personal Data is incorrect, wrong or incomplete, we will, upon your request, take steps to check it and correct any factual inaccuracies.
  • Right to erasure: you can also ask us to delete, remove, or stop using your Personal Data if there is no need for us to keep it.
  • Right to restriction of processing: under certain circumstances, you may ask us to restrict the processing of your Personal Data.
  • Right to object to processing: under certain circumstance, you can object to us keeping or using your Personal Data.
  • Right to data portability: if we hold your Personal Data electronically, you can ask us to transfer the data to another organisation in a safe and secure way and in a machine readable format.

If you wish to exercise any of the rights set out above, please contact us by emailing dataprotection@alphafx.co.uk.  We are committed to working with you to obtain a fair resolution of any complaint or concern about privacy. If, however, you believe that we have not been able to assist with your complaint or concern, you have the right:

  • in relation to elitecfd Limited: to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulator for data protection issues (www.ico.org.uk);
  • in relation to elitecfd Europe Limited: to make a complaint at any time to the Office of the Information and Data Protection Commissioner, the Maltese regulator for protection issues (https://idpc.org.mt/) or to your national Data Protection Authority, if you are located in the EEA (Our Members | European Data Protection Board (europa.eu)).

 

10.   COOKIES

We may use cookies and other similar tracking technologies on our website and Online Platform. Cookies are small text files that may be stored on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. These technologies may do different things, such as letting you navigate between web pages efficiently and remembering your preferences. To find out more about how we use cookies and email tracking, please see our Cookie Policy below.

 

11.   HOW IS THIS PRIVACY POLICY MODIFIED?

This Privacy Policy may change from time to time, and we shall take all reasonable steps to inform you in such a case, in particular by publication on our website, which we encourage you to consult regularly.

 

Cookie Policy

What exactly are cookies?

In order to collect the information as described in this Policy, we may use cookies and similar technology on our website and emails.

A cookie is a small file which is sent to your browser and stored on your computer’s hard drive, mobile phone or other device.

You can set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie. This enables you to decide if you want to accept it or not. However, some of the services and features offered through websites may not function properly if your cookies are disabled.

Cookies can be first-party or third-party cookies:

  • First party cookies – cookies that the website you are visiting or link you are clicking places on your computer.
  • Third party cookies – cookies placed on your computer through the website but by third parties, such as, Google.

The cookies placed on our website

We use the following cookies on our website:

  • Strictly necessary cookies – These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features. Without these cookies, services you have asked for cannot be provided. They are deleted when you close the browser. These are first party cookies.
  • Performance cookies – These cookies collect information in an anonymous form about how visitors use our website. They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around the website when they are using it and the approximate regions that they are visiting from. These are first party cookies.
  • Functionality cookies – These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features.  These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customise. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites. These are first party cookies.
  • Targeting or advertising cookies – These cookies allow us and our advertisers to deliver information that is more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement as well as help measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. They remember that you have visited our website and may help us in compiling your profile. These are persistent cookies which will be kept on your device until their expiration or earlier manual deletion.
  • Social Media cookies – These cookies allow you to connect with social media networks. These are persistent cookies which will be kept on your device until their expiration or earlier manual deletion. These are third party cookies.
  • IP Tracking cookies – we may use third parties to provide information about visitors to our websites. When you visit our website we will record your IP address. This address will be matched against public and proprietary IP address databases to provide us with information about your visit. This information may identify the organisation to whom the IP address is registered but not individuals. In some limited cases i.e. single person companies, it may be possible to identify personal data from publicly available ICANN data. These are third party cookies.
  • Post-Click Tracking Cookies – These cookies are used to report on the pages of www.alphafx.co.uk that have been viewed by visitors to the site who have followed links placed within email correspondence. This analysis helps us to analyse engagement with content that is viewed by the contacts in our database and therefore allows us to improve it in the future.  Since these cookies are paired to individual email addresses, it will be possible for us to identify the activities of the individual who the email address is registered to. These are third party cookies.
  • User journey tracking cookies – We use Hotjar in order to better understand our users’ needs and to optimize this service and experience. Hotjar is a technology service that helps us better understand our users experience (e.g. how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, what users do and don’t like, etc.) and this enables us to build and maintain our service with user feedback. Hotjar uses cookies and other technologies to collect data on our users’ behaviour and their devices (in particular a device’s IP address (captured and stored only in anonymized form), device screen size, device type (unique device identifiers), browser information, geographic location (country only), preferred language used to display our website). Hotjar stores this information in a pseudonymized user profile. Neither Hotjar nor we will ever use this information to identify individual users or to match it with further data on an individual user. For further details, please see Hotjar’s privacy policy by clicking on this link https://www.hotjar.com/legal/policies/privacy/. These are third party cookies.
  • Document Tracking Cookies – Some documents we send clients use cookies to track engagement with our documents.  These cookies are also paired to individual email addresses and therefore make it possible for us to identify the activities of the individual who the email address is registered to. These are third party cookies.

We may combine information from these types of cookies and technologies with information about you from any other source.

 

Cookie consent and opting out

We assume that you are happy for us to place cookies on your device. However, you may refuse to accept most cookies by activating the setting on your browser which allows you to refuse the setting of cookies.  However, if you select this setting you may be unable to access certain parts of our website. Unless you have adjusted your browser setting so that it will refuse cookies, our system will issue cookies when you log on to our website.

In order to opt out of IP Tracking cookies, Post-Click Tracking Cookies, User journey tracking cookies or Document Tracking Cookies you will need to email dataprotection@alphafx.co.uk.

If you are located in the European Economic Area (“EEA”) and use our website, when you arrive on our website a pop-up message will appear notifying you that we use cookies on our website. You will be deemed to have provided consent to this Policy if you continue browsing our website.   If you, or another user of your device, wish to withdraw your consent at any time, you can do so by altering your browser settings otherwise we will assume that you are happy to receive cookies from our website. For more information please visit www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/.