Privacy policy

Swoop Finance (Pty) Ltd is registered in South Africa (company number 2023/820661/07) and has its Registered Office at 21 Dreyer Street, Cape Town, South Africa, 7708. The Company is a subsidiary of BizFly Limited, registered in Ireland (company number 601838).

Who we are and how to contact us

We are Swoop Finance (Pty) Ltd, the owner and operator of www.swoopfunding.co.za.

www.swoopfunding.co.za (owned and operated by Swoop Finance (Pty) Ltd) is a business finance and cost savings matching platform for eligible South African businesses.

www.swoopfunding.co.za reviews and compares finance matching options across loans, grants and investments, as well as savings matching options for business banking, foreign exchange and utility costs.

Swoop Finance (Pty) Ltd (“we”, “us” and “our” in this privacy policy) is the data controller responsible for personal information processed by this website, and by the company.

Business’ refers to customers who use Swoop directly, or indirectly (“you” and “your” in this privacy policy). Where a business is registered by an ‘Introducer’, the business must have provided permission to the ‘Introducer’ to act on it’s behalf prior to registration with Swoop.

It is most important that you read this privacy policy carefully so that you are fully aware of how and why we use your personal information. We do not knowingly collect personal information relating to children under the age of 18 – children under the age of 18 should not use our website.

support@swoopfunding.co.za

Address: 21 Dreyer Street, Cape Town, South Africa, 7708.

You have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Regulator (South Africa), the South African supervisory authority for data protection issues (www.inforegulator.org.za/). We would appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the IRSA, so please contact us in the first instance.

Changes to this privacy policy

We reserve the right to amend or modify this privacy policy from time to time. This privacy policy was last amended on 26th June 2023.

Types of personal information we collect

Depending on the requirements of your business, we may obtain any of the following:

personal information, so that we can identify who you are (e.g. your name and your date and place of birth)
personal information so that we can contact you (e.g. your home address, your email address and your contact telephone numbers)
other more personal information so that we can help you with your business requirements (e.g. details about your health or criminal convictions/ offences – this data is known as “special category data” and we will only collect this data if the law allows us to do so)
behavioural and/or technical personal information (e.g. details about how you browse our website, and the devices and technology you use to browse our website).

How we use personal information, the grounds in law upon which we rely to use it, and why we use it.

How we might use your personal information?	What legal grounds (‘lawful basis’) do we have to use your personal information?	Why do we use your personal information the way we do?
We may share your personal information with our approved finance/service providers so that they can return information to you via our website.	This processing of your personal information is necessary so that we can provide our services to you in accordance with our website terms and conditions.	Without processing your personal information in this way we would be unable to provide our services to you/your business.
We may share your personal information with a limited number of approved third-party data providers in return for further information about you.	We have a legitimate interest in processing your personal information in this way.	It is in our legitimate interests to process you personal information in this way so that we can provide a more user-friendly experience.
If you opt-in to receive general marketing from us, we may process your personal information for the purposes of providing our general marketing and information on trusted third-parties to you. For example, if you opt in to receive our general marketing, we may send you newsletters and updates about our latest services or services provided by trusted third parties.	We will only process your personal information for the purposes of providing direct marketing to you/your business with your consent.	Our marketing materials are diligently drafted, topical, relevant and useful for our business customers.
If, during your application process, you opt-in to receive contact from our approved finance/service providers, we may provide your contact details to those partners so that they can contact you in order to progress the required support for your business.	We will only share your personal information with our approved finance/service providers so that they can contact you in this way with your consent.	We understand that some of our business customers will prefer to communicate exclusively with us. By opting-in to receive contact from our approved finance/service providers, you/your business may save valuable time and resources.
We may process your personal information in order to send you service communications.	This processing of your personal information is necessary so that we can deliver our support and services to your business in accordance with our website terms and conditions.	Without processing your personal information in this way we would be unable to deliver our services and support to your business.
We may process your personal information in order to detect and prevent financial crime, including fraud.	We have a legitimate interest in processing your personal information for the purposes of detecting and preventing financial crime.	It is in our legitimate interests to process your personal information in this way because financial crime negatively impacts all of us.
We may process your personal information and share it with our approved finance partners and third-party providers in order to verify that a financing and/or servicing arrangement between you and one of our approved finance/service providers has taken place.	We have a legitimate interest in processing your personal information for transaction validation and audit purposes.	It is in our legitimate interests to process your personal information in this way so that we can continue to provide our services to you. This means it is imperative that we can audit our approved finance/service providers for transaction validation purposes and, where appropriate, receive commission or other payments for services rendered by us.
We may process your personal information in order to personalise or improve aspects of our service and for troubleshooting and other quality control and testing purposes, including for the purposes of responding to any queries or complaints raised by you or our approved finance/service providers.	We have a legitimate interest in processing your personal information in order to ensure that we are always able to provide an excellent service to our valued customers.	It is in our legitimate interests to process your personal information in this way so that we can provide a high quality of service. To do this, we regularly monitor and seek to improve our interactions with you and our approved finance/service providers. This helps us to understand how we can better satisfy the needs of your business and hence grow our business. Sometimes we may also need to access your personal information in order to resolve any queries or complaints which are made about our service. Our work in this area ensures that we can continue to provide the high level of service which your business deserves.
We may process your personal information in order to comply with our legal and/or regulatory obligations.	This processing of your personal information is necessary so that we can comply with the numerous legal and/or regulatory obligations to which we are subject.	We operate within a heavily regulated environment; we are subject to numerous laws, rules, regulations and requirements. Sometimes it is necessary for us to process your personal information in order to comply with the laws, rules, regulations and requirements to which we are subject.

How we collect personal information

We collect personal information from you when you interact or engage with our website, including when you register an account with us via our website. We may also collect personal information from you when you talk to us on the phone, by post or online including via email, social media and mobile device apps. We may also engage with you and hence collect personal information from you if you choose to provide feedback or take part in any of our other market research initiatives, customer surveys or promotions.

Occasionally, we may also collect personal information about you from our approved finance/service providers, third parties or publicly available sources.

Third parties with whom we may exchange personal information

We may share personal information with or receive personal information from:

other members of our corporate group, including our and their professional advisers,
our approved finance/service providers,
other third-party providers (for example CIPC and credit bureaus),
our regulators and other regulatory bodies, including the Financial Conduct Authority and the Information Commissioner’s Office;
law enforcement and fraud prevention agencies;
third parties to whom we may sell, transfer or merge parts of our business or assets or third parties whose business or assets we may acquire; and
our third-party suppliers (for example, IT software and service providers, IT maintenance and hosting, marketing/PR agencies).

We work closely with our partners to ensure that we only share information with them, and they only share information with us, that is either required to provide you with the services or is required by law.

To provide you with a full range of services we also work with a number of carefully selected partners who offer some, or all, of their services by allowing you to directly ‘click-through’ from the Swoop site to the partners site. In circumstances where you ‘click-through’ to a partners site:

Swoop will always make it clear when you are leaving our site and going to one of our partners
any information that you subsequently provide to a partner following a ‘click-through’ will be governed by their Privacy Policy and we recommend reading their privacy policy before continuing to use their services.

How third parties with whom we exchange personal information may use that personal information

We impose strict restrictions on the things that third parties may do with personal information that we give to them. For example, such third parties may process personal information that we give to them in order to:

assess the eligibility of your business for products, support or services to meet the requirements of your business,
determine/verify your identity and hence carry out necessary checks:
- with fraud prevention agencies in order to detect and prevent financial crime, including fraud,
- with credit reference agencies, with the exception of a small number of products where we are obliged to perform comprehensive ID checks (i.e. commercial mortgages) this will appear as soft searches on your credit report and hence should not adversely affect your credit profile,
- against information our finance/service providers already hold about you (for example, if you are already known to their corporate group), and
- with any other agencies in order that we comply with our legal and regulatory obligations.
share personal information with their third-party providers and relevant/ appropriate industry and/or government research activities and/or databases and,
conduct internal research, reports and management information (‘MI’) reporting (such as by analysing the nature, scope and volume of transactions) in order to develop the products and services which they offer;
share personal information with fraud prevention agencies who will use it to prevent fraud and money-laundering and to verify your identity. If fraud is detected, your could be refused certain finance, services and/or support.

If you/your business intends to or proceeds to transact with any one or more of our approved finance/service providers, you are strongly encouraged to read the terms of that provider’s privacy policy in order to satisfy yourself as to the purposes for which your that provider will use your personal information.

What communications you may receive from us

The communications we send to our customers can be categorised broadly as “direct marketing communications” and “service communications”.

Direct marketing communications

Our direct marketing communications includes our newsletters and information about the latest services and support we can offer to your business.

If you do not want to receive marketing information from us, we will not send any direct marketing communications to you.

Service communications

Service communications broadly comprise of communications which:

we have a legal or regulatory obligation to send to you (such as communications which we are obliged by a regulator to send to you from time to time);
we send in connection with the provision of our services to you (such as an email which we send to you in order to confirm the best match for your business’s finance requirements); and
we send so that we can provide services at your request (such as password reset emails, which you may ask us to send if you do not remember your login credentials but want to access our services).

Sending personal information outside South Africa

We will only ever send personal information to providers outside South Africa if those providers are required to protect personal information in exactly the same way they would be required to protect personal information if they were based within South Africa.

How long we retain personal information

We may keep your personal information for up to six (6) years following the date on which you last use our website or only for as long as is reasonably necessary thereafter in order to:

respond fully to any questions or complaints;
evidence that we have treated customers fairly or satisfy some other legal, accounting, tax or reporting requirement; and
establish, exercise or defend legal claims in accordance with statutory limitation periods.

Data security

The security of personal information is extremely important to us and hence we have put in place appropriate security measures to protect personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way.

Your legal rights

Under the Protection of Personal Information Act you have a number of important rights free of charge. In summary, those include rights to:

access to your personal information and to certain other supplementary information that this Policy is already designed to address;
require us to correct any mistakes in your information which we hold;
require the erasure of personal information concerning you in certain situations;
receive the personal information concerning you which you have provided to us, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format;
object at any time to processing of personal information concerning you for direct marketing;
object to decisions being taken by automated means which produce legal effects concerning you or similarly significantly affect you;
object in certain other situations to our continued processing of your personal information;
otherwise restrict our processing of your personal information in certain circumstances;
where consent is our lawful basis for processing your personal information, withdraw such consent;
claim compensation for damages caused by our breach of any data protection laws.

For further information on each of those rights, including the circumstances in which they apply, view the website of the Information Regulator (South Africa) at www.inforegulator.org.za/.

Right of access

You have a right to know whether we are processing your personal information. If we are processing your personal information, you also have a right to request copies of your personal information that we are processing and certain further information, including the purposes of our processing and the recipients or categories of recipients to whom we have disclosed (or will disclose) your personal information.

Right to rectification

You have the right to require us to rectify or complete any inaccurate or incomplete personal information that we are holding about you.

Right to erasure

You have a right to ask us to erase your personal information. This is also known as the “right to be forgotten”. We must erase your personal information following your request except in limited circumstances prescribed by law, such as where we need to retain your personal information in order to comply with a legal obligation or in order to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. In these circumstances, we will restrict our processing of your personal information by putting it “beyond use”.

Right to restriction of processing

You have a right to require us to restrict processing of your personal information where:-

you believe that the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, and we require reasonable time to verify the accuracy of that personal information,
your personal information has been unlawfully processed by us, but you do not want us to erase that personal information,
it is no longer necessary for us to keep your personal information for the purposes for which they were collected by us, but they are required by you for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims, or
you exercise your right to object to processing and we require reasonable time to verify whether there are any overriding grounds upon which we may rely in order to continue that processing.

Right to data portability

If we process your personal information with your consent or because it is necessary for us to do so in order to provide our service to you/your business, you may require us to move, copy or transfer that personal information to you or another third party in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format.

Right to object

You have a right to object to our processing of your personal information where we are processing that personal information on legitimate interest grounds. We will stop processing this personal information if you exercise your right to object unless there are overriding grounds upon which we may rely in order to continue that processing or unless that processing is necessary in order to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

You also have a right to object to our processing of your personal information for direct marketing purposes. You can use the unsubscribe hyperlink in any direct marketing messages which we may send to you. We will stop processing your personal information for direct marketing purposes if you request us to do so.

Right to withdraw consent

If we process your personal information with your consent, you have a right to withdraw your consent at any time. If you withdraw your consent, we may be unable to continue to provide certain services to you/your business but we will inform you if that is the case.

Cookies

For information on the cookies we use, please refer to our Cookie Policy.

Complaints

You can complain to us or the Information Commissioner’s Office at any time. However, we appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns so please do contact us in the first instance using this email address:

support@swoopfunding.co.za