Privacy policy

Countrywide/We/Our/Us: Countrywide Legal Indemnities Ltd, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Firm Reference Number 311764

Policyholder: any holder of a policy issued by Countrywide

You: any Solicitor, Legal Executive, Licensed Conveyancer or individual acting under the supervision of a Solicitor, or any insurance broker registered with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)

We collect the following information about you:

Bank account details: including account number and sort code, only when required.

Contact information: including your name, phone number, email address, and office address.

General usage information: including how you send your enquiries to us, which products you order, how many of your quotes you take up, and your communications with us.

Website account information: including the date you registered and your password (please note that your password is encrypted and cannot be seen by anyone).

Website usage information: which pages you visit, what kind of device you are using, and your browser configuration. This information is collected using cookies, and you can find out more from our Cookie policy.

We may collect the following information about the policyholder:

Bank account details: including account number and sort code, only when required.

Contact information: including name and property address.

Policyholder information is supplied to us when necessary by their appointed solicitor or conveyancer, or broker, when getting a quote and/or ordering a policy, or when notifying us of a claim.

Your privacy is protected by law, which states that we are only allowed to use your personal information if we have a valid reason for doing so. These reasons include:

Legal obligation: we are required by law to use your personal information in this way.

Contractual: we may use your personal information to fulfil a contract between you and Countrywide.

Legitimate interest: we may use your personal information if we have a business or commercial reason.

What we use your personal information for	Our reason for doing so
Keeping your records up-to-date	Legal obligation: we are required by law to ensure the information we hold for you is accurate.
Fulfilling the contract	Contractual: we are providing you with the full information about the quote you requested or the policy you ordered. Subsequently, we are seeking or providing information to enable the quote to proceed or the policy to be issued.
Contacting you	Legitimate interest: we will contact you about new products, updates, and important announcements. You can find out more in the ‘Marketing’ section below.
To study how you use our services	Legitimate interest: this information helps us to understand our own performance as well as helping us to review and develop new and existing products and services.
To manage payments made between us and you	Contractual: we are ensuring that payments made from, or to, you are correctly made and allocated to the correct policy.
Providing a claims service	Contractual: managing the claims process to provide a satisfactory and final conclusion for our policyholder, including sharing information with third parties as appropriate.
To prevent fraud	Legal obligation: we are required by law to keep our services secure and prevent abuse and fraud.
To fulfil agreements and contracts	Contractual: to exercise any other rights set out in agreements or contracts, beyond providing a quote and policy.

We collect personal information about you when you:

• obtain a quote
• order a policy
• make a payment to us
• are due a payment from us
• register online to use our services
• amend the information we already hold about you
• make a complaint
• enter a competition
• complete a customer survey

We may share your information with the following organisations:

• Our insurer, Liberty Legal Indemnities, which is part of Liberty Mutual Insurance Europe SE, UK branch
• Any agents of the insurer, such as Tysers Insurance Brokers Ltd, or auditors
• Specialist law firms and other professional advisors we have appointed to assist with a policyholder’s claim
• Companies that introduce you to us
• The Financial Ombudsman Service
• Our auditors

We will only send your data outside of the European Economic Area (EEA) if:

• you have asked us to do so
• we are legally obligated to do so
• we need to do so in order to fulfill our contract with you

If we do transfer any information outside of the EEA, we will make sure it is protected in the same way as if it was being used inside the EEA by:

• transferring it to a non-EEA country that has privacy laws offering the same protection as the EEA.
• entering into a contract with the recipient of your information that requires them to protect it to the same standards of the EEA.
• transferring it to entities that are part of Privacy Shield, which is a framework that sets out privacy standards for data sent between US and EU countries, and ensures those standards are similar to those within the EEA.

If you choose not to provide us with personal information about you, it may delay or prevent us from providing our services or fulfilling our contracts with you. Although we may ask for information that is not required in order to provide services or fulfil contracts, this will be clearly marked as optional.

We may use your personal information to tell you about relevant products, offers, news, and updates to our services.

We will use your contact information, as well as information about how you use our services, to decide which marketing messages to send to you.

You can ask us to stop sending you marketing messages at any time. This will not affect messages sent to you about quotes you have obtained, or policies you have ordered.

We do not send marketing material to policyholders.

We will keep your personal information as long as you continue to use our services, or for the lifetime of a policy if you arranged cover that remains in force. If you are a policyholder, we will keep your personal information as long as you are covered by our policy.

After you stop using our services, we may keep your data for up to three years to:

• respond to any questions or complaints
• show that we treated you fairly
• maintain records according to rules that apply to us.

We may keep your data for longer than three years if we cannot delete it for legal, regulatory, or technical reasons.

You can request a full copy of all the information we hold about you by writing to : The Data Protection Officer, Countrywide Legal Indemnities, 3 St James Court, Whitefriars, Norwich, NR3 1RJ

If you believe the information we have about you is incorrect, you have the right to request it be corrected. You may be able to change this yourself via www.cli.co.uk and signing into Elite, or you can contact us by phone, email, or in writing, and we will amend our records.

You have the right to object to our use of your personal information, or to request that we delete, remove, or stop using your information if there is no need for us to keep it. This is known as the ‘right to object’ and ‘right to erasure’, or the ‘right to be forgotten’.

We may need to hold your information for legal, regulatory, or contractual reasons. You have the right to ask us to restrict the use of your personal information (other than complying with regulator requests, or handling a claim). You can ask us to restrict the use of your personal information if:

• it isn’t accurate, but you don’t want us to correct it
• it has been used unlawfully but you don’t want us to delete it
• it isn’t relevant any more, but you want us to keep it for legal or regulatory purposes
• you have asked us to stop using your information but you are waiting for us to tell you if we are allowed to continue to use it.

If you are unhappy with how we have used your personal information, you can register a complaint by

• emailing complaints@cli.co.uk
• calling 01603 617617
• writing to The Data Protection Officer, Countrywide Legal Indemnities, 3 St James Court, Whitefriars, Norwich, NR3 1RJ.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, and to lodge an appeal if you are not happy with the outcome of a complaint. You can visit their website to find out more and report a concern.