Consumer survey privacy notice

The Financial Ombudsman Service is the data controller for any personal information that we process unless we state otherwise. If you wish to contact us, you can find details here.

Financial Ombudsman Service

Exchange Tower, London, E14 9SR

www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk

0300 123 9 123 or 0800 023 4 567

This notice applies to the personal information that we handle in our consumer surveys. We invite consumers to participate in surveys in line with our consumer privacy notice. We automatically add you to our survey participant list. However you can let us know at any time if you do not want us to contact you for our surveys.

Personal information means information that is about you – for example, your name and date of birth. With your consent, we process (e.g. collect, record, share) your personal information from the survey to collect feedback from our consumers on their experience of using the service. We use that feedback to help improve the way we work.

With your explicit consent, we also process special category data such as information about your religion or belief, physical or mental health, racial or ethnic origins, gender identity or sexual orientation. We process this special category of personal data so we can understand  the barriers to the accessibility of our service, fairness of our service’s complaint handling and fairness of financial industry as a whole.

We may also contact you for additional feedback about your experience with the service – but only if you give your consent.

We survey people at different points throughout our process and any feedback you give within this survey will be treated as confidential. The answers you provide, including those in free text boxes may be shared with relevant employees to assist in improving the service that we provide.  

Providing answers to any of the questions on the survey is voluntary, but the more information that you are willing to provide, the better we will be able to make improvements to the service and ensure that the service can be accessed equally by everyone.  

Most information that you provide will be anonymised and aggregated before being shared more widely. We remove any personal data from publications that we share or make public. We have additional safeguards on how we use your special category data which can only be seen by a small number of our information technology analysts and a small separate research team who analyse the results, anonymise them and only share this information on an aggregated basis.

We keep your personal information only for as long as we need to. We will retain your personal information on our systems in accordance with our retention schedule for six years from the date of the survey. After this period we will securely destroy your personal information.

We take appropriate steps to safeguard your data.

The information collected is held in our case handling system, hosted by Microsoft, who process your personal information on our behalf.

Microsoft is required to keep your personal data safe and secure. They have agreed to treat the information confidentially and are not permitted to use your information for their own purposes.

Neither we nor Microsoft store any data outside of the UK or European Economic Area (EEA).

A link to Microsoft’s privacy notice can be found at: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/trust-center/privacy

Cookies are used to store information on your device to ensure the correct operation of the software. See Microsoft link for information on cookies: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-voice/cookies

Our main legal basis for processing your personal information here is that you have given us your consent. Where you have provided consent, you can withdraw it at any time.

You have a number of rights under data protection laws which we have set out below. These rights don’t always apply and sometimes there are exemptions we can and might apply:

Right to access – you have the right to ask us for a copy of your personal information.

Right to rectification – you have the right to ask us to correct personal information that you think is wrong and to complete personal information that you think is incomplete.

Right to erasure – you have the right to ask us to erase your personal information.

Right to restriction of processing – you have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information.

Right to data portability – you have the right to ask that we transfer the information you have given us to another organisation or to give it to you.

Normally, you won’t have to pay anything to exercise these rights and we will have one month to respond to you. If you wish to make a request, please contact us at [email protected].   

Our data protection officer (DPO) is Michelle Goddard. You can also contact our DPO at [email protected]. Michelle or a colleague on her behalf will help deal with your concern.

If you’re unhappy with our response, you can contact the Information Commissioner's Office at www.ico.org.uk, [email protected] or on 01625 545 745.