Privacy Notice

Last updated: April 2024

Protecting your personal information is extremely important to us at Legal & General. It’s especially important for a large financial company like ours, as our customers trust us to look after a huge amount of sensitive information on everything from their business affairs to their medical history.

The way we collect, use, store and share your information is equally important. Our customers expect us to manage their information privately and securely. If we don’t, they’ll lose their trust in us.

This privacy notice tells you how we collect and process your personal information. Please take a few minutes to read it and show it to anyone else connected to your product(s) or whose data you have shared with us (including but not limited to joint policyholders, grantees, trustees, and beneficiaries). This privacy notice may be subject to future change.

What does this privacy notice cover?

What is personal information?

We may collect and process the following personal information about you:

Where do we get our information from?

• Directly from you - information you provide when you fill in forms or contact us by phone, email etc. This could include information you provide to us electronically (through our website or an online portal, for example). We may record phone calls for our mutual protection and to improve our customer service standards.
• Information we collect about you or receive from other sources.
  • information we get from your online browsing activity,
  • information from a third party (e.g. tracing agencies, credit reference agencies and heir hunters)
  • information from publicly available sources such as social media platforms or the electoral register.
  • We may also receive information if you have been dealing with a financial adviser or broker, or have been introduced to us by another company (e.g. a bank, insurer, pension provider, building society, your employer or their financial adviser)
• We use cookies and similar technologies to support the functioning of our websites and applications. This includes allowing you to browse between pages effectively, recording and storing your preferences and generally improving your online experience. They can also help to ensure that adverts you see online are more relevant to you. You can find more information about setting your cookie preferences by using the ‘Cookie Policy’ link at the bottom of our websites e.g. legalandgeneral.com.

How do we use your information?

We use personal information that we hold about you:

• To carry out our responsibilities resulting from any agreements you’ve entered into with us (e.g. to provide financial advice, underwrite and administer your products, including processing claims, resolving and responding to complaints, checking for false or inaccurate information against previous Legal & General product applications and mortgage affordability checks) and to provide you with the information, products and services that you’ve asked from us (e.g. quotes, pension tracing and sourcing care).
• To provide you with marketing information about services and products we offer across the Legal & General group which may be of interest to you. If you have opted in to receive marketing from us, based on your marketing preferences we may deliver this information by post, telephone, e-mail, SMS or personalised online marketing via our own systems such as My Account, social media platforms and/or other third-party websites e.g. YouTube. Please note that if you choose not to receive online marketing, you will not see personalised marketing messages using your personal data, however you may still see generic online advertising about our products and services. We will not sell your data to third parties for them to market to you. We may also send marketing to you using our “legitimate interests”, please see below for further information.
• To tell you about changes to our services and products.
• To comply with any applicable legal or regulatory requirements (including “know your customer” checks, or to comply with any applicable regulatory reporting or disclosure requirements).
• For carrying out market research, statistical analysis and customer profiling to help us to improve our processes, products and services and generate new business (e.g. to understand digital behaviours, identify financial attitudes, find new audiences with similar attributes and develop more engaging communications). This may also include sharing your personal information with our third-party platform and media suppliers to prevent you seeing adverts for products you already have with us.
• To define our actuarial, pricing and underwriting strategies.
• To maintain the accuracy and consistency of your information for all your products across the Legal & General Group.
• To run our business in an efficient and proper way. This includes testing our systems, managing our financial position, business capability, planning, communications, corporate governance, quality assurance and audit.

When you apply for a product or to receive a service from us, the application form you fill out or the resulting contract may contain additional conditions relating to the way we use and process your personal information. These will apply in addition to the uses described in this document.

In some cases, we may use software or systems to make automated decisions (including profiling) based on the personal information we hold or collect from others. These may include:

• The prevention and detection of fraud and financial crime
  To perform transaction monitoring, identity verification, money laundering and sanctions checks, and to identify politically exposed individuals. We are required by law to perform these activities which may be achieved using solely automated means to make decisions about you or any individual related to your products or application. We may use these activities to decline the services you have requested or to stop providing existing services to you.

• Providing quotes, calculating premiums, and underwriting decisions
  We may assess a number of factors including information about you and your health, lifestyle information such as your postcode, occupation, and hazardous pursuits that you perform. These factors will be assessed against our pricing and underwriting criteria, which may include statistics regarding life expectancy, illness, injury, and demographic risks. We may use these activities to determine the price of your products and whether we should undertake the risk of insuring you - including how much insurance should be granted to you, how much you should pay for it and whether or not to insure you in the first place. These decisions may be achieved using solely automated means.

  Where a whole of market comparison quote is offered, we may share your details, (including any relevant medical information) with a trusted business partner in order to obtain this quotation.

  For mortgage purposes the factors may include your creditworthiness, assessment of mortgage affordability, property value and checks against records held by credit referencing and fraud prevention agencies.

• The provision of financial advice and recommendations
  We may perform computer-based assessments with your personal and financial information in order to produce your financial advice recommendations. These activities are not solely based on automated processing and our qualified financial advisers will always validate the outcome to ensure that the decisions are suitable based on the information that you have provided.

• AI and Speech Analytics
  We may use speech analytics on recorded phone calls to help us meet our regulatory obligations e.g. identify vulnerable customers, complaints, staff training needs, process and product development, quality control and audit. These profiling activities are not solely based on automated processing. The results are manually reviewed to decide if we need to take further action.

  We are also exploring whether AI technologies can help in other scenarios, for example to summarise long, technical or complex documents (such as medical reports). This may include using your data to help train the AI, however, this will not result in any decisions being applied against you.

• Servicing activities such as
  (i) Personalising the content and design of communications and online services (e.g. My Account) and
  (ii) Determining when to provide tailored communications about your Legal & General products (e.g. as a result of changes in your personal circumstances or lifestyle) and the appropriate channels to use.
  These may be achieved using profiling in order to predict certain characteristics about you (e.g. your economic situation, interests, personal preferences or transactional behaviour). The activities will not have a detrimental effect on you.

Using your information in accordance with data protection laws

Data protection laws require us to meet certain conditions before we’re allowed to use your personal information in the way we describe in this privacy notice. We take these responsibilities extremely seriously. To use your personal information, we’ll rely on the following conditions, depending on the activities we’re carrying out:

• Providing our contracts and services to you: We’ll process your personal information to carry out our responsibilities resulting from any agreements you’ve entered into with us and to provide you with the information, products and services you’ve asked for from us, which may include online services.
• Complying with applicable laws: We may process your personal information to comply with any legal obligation we’re subject to.
• Consent: Where you have consented, we will contact third parties (e.g. pension providers) to obtain or share information on your behalf.

  We may also provide you with the opportunity to consent to certain optional processes, such as responding to surveys or participating in focus groups.

  We may provide you with marketing information about our services or products where you’ve provided your consent for us to do so. You may opt out of marketing at any time by e-mailing or telephoning your customer services team, details of which can also be found using the relevant Contact Us section of our website. You can also manage your marketing preferences on our customer self-service system, My Account.

• Legitimate interests: To use your personal data for any other purpose described in this privacy notice, we’ll rely on a condition known as "legitimate interests". It’s in our legitimate interests to collect your personal data as it provides us with the information that we need to provide our services to you more effectively.  We may use your information to:
   
  • Carry out market research and product development, which can include creating customer demographics and/ or profiling.
  • Develop and test the effectiveness of marketing activities.
  • Send marketing information, via post only, to customers who have a relevant and appropriate relationship with Legal & General and other individuals we believe may be interested in our products. This will not apply if they have opted-out (which can be done at any time).
  • Develop, test and manage our brands, products and services.
  • On occasion, we may wish to send a card or small gift to a customer, in recognition of their particular circumstances.
  • Analyse and manage how our customers use products and services from us and our business partners, including through customer surveys.

To use legitimate interest, we must carry out an assessment of our interests in using your personal data against the interests you have as a citizen and the rights you have under data protection laws.

The outcome of this assessment will determine whether we can rely on legitimate interest in order to process your personal data. We’ll always act reasonably and give full and proper consideration to your interests in carrying out this assessment.

• Special category data: We may process medical and health, racial and ethnic origin, genetic and biometric or sex life and sexual orientation information you have provided, and any other sensitive information obtained from a third party (e.g. your GP or other medical professional). We will only process data that is needed for specific purposes, such as allowing us to provide financial advice, underwrite and administer new and existing products, and deal with claims. Our lawful basis for processing will be either vital interests, public interests in accordance with applicable law, or by obtaining your explicit consent.
• Criminal Conviction Data: Where necessary to meet legal obligations, we may process this type of information both for the purposes of allowing us to underwrite and administer your products, deal with claims and also for the prevention of financial crime (see below for further details).

Please be aware that the personal information you provide to us, and which we collect about you, is required for us to be able to provide our services to you and without it we may not be able to do so.

How long do we keep your information for?

We’ll keep your personal information in accordance with our internal retention policies. We’ll determine the length of time we keep it for, based on the minimum retention periods required by law or regulation. We’ll only keep your personal information after this period if there’s a legitimate and provable business reason to do so.

For pension products, we may retain your personal information indefinitely using the legitimate interests condition in order to support future enquires or claims from you, your family or financial adviser and our regulators.

For certain research and statistical activities, we may indefinitely retain minimised personal information about you, including medical information, solely to define our actuarial, underwriting and pricing risk strategies. These activities will not be used to make a decision, or take measures, against you.

Occasionally, it may be impossible to delete data, due to technical limitations. In these cases, we will take steps to put the data beyond use. This means that your data will not be accessed or shared, and your rights and freedoms will not be affected.

Who do we share your information with?

We’ll only disclose your information to:

• Other companies within the Legal & General Group, third-party suppliers, contractors and service providers for the purposes listed under “How do we use your information” above.
• Selected third parties, so that they can contact you with details of the services that they provide, where you have expressly opted-in or consented to the disclosure of your personal data for these purposes.
• Our regulators, government agencies (e.g. HMRC), law enforcement agencies, credit reference agencies, data verification and tracing agencies, fraud prevention agencies, as well as our professional advisers etc.
• Our reinsurers and to any other insurance company to whom you apply for products or services. This may include special category and criminal conviction data. You can find an up to date list of our reinsurers on our website.

Additionally, 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’ll disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets.
• If you have been dealing with a financial adviser, we’ll provide information about your products and, where appropriate, other information about your dealings with us, to enable the adviser to give you informed advice.
• For employer sponsored schemes, we may share some details of your plan with your employer and any professional advisor(s) they appoint on their or your behalf, to service and provide accurate financial advice about the scheme.
• In order to enforce or apply the terms of any contract with you.
• To protect you and Legal & General from financial crime, Legal & General may be required to verify the identity of new and sometimes existing customers. This may be achieved by using credit reference agencies to search sources of information relating to you (an identity search). If this fails, Legal & General may need to approach you to obtain documentary evidence of identity. The checks will not affect your credit rating but your credit record may show that a search has been made (sometimes referred to as a soft footprint).
• If you make a claim, we’ll share your information (where necessary) with other insurance companies to prevent fraudulent claims.
• Legal & General Surveying Services may use a third party surveyor to carry out the survey or valuation of the property.
• If you’ve been introduced to us by another company (e.g. bank, insurer, building society, your employer or their financial adviser), we may share your information with them to enable them to:
  
  • Administer and service your products.
  • Carry out market research, statistical analysis and customer profiling.
  • Where you have consented, send you marketing information by post, telephone, e-mail and SMS about their products and those of carefully selected third parties.
  • Assist you with your application process (aggregator and price comparison websites only).

Credit Reference Agencies (mortgage customers)

In order to process your mortgage application, we will supply your personal information to credit reference agencies (CRAs) and they will give us information about you, such as about your financial history. We do this to assess creditworthiness and product suitability, check your identity, manage your account, trace and recover debts and prevent criminal activity.

Dependent on the type of mortgage, a hard footprint may be left on your credit file, which may affect your credit score when an application has been submitted. This may or may not affect your ability to obtain credit from other providers.

Legal & General will also continue to exchange information about you with CRAs on an ongoing basis, including about your settled accounts and any debts not fully repaid on time. CRAs will share your information with other organisations. Your data will also be linked to the data of your spouse, any joint applicants or other financial associates.

The identities of the CRAs, and the ways in which they use and share personal information, are explained in more detail at:

• Call Credit - callcredit.co.uk/crain
  
  
• Equifax - equifax.co.uk/crain
  
  
• Experian - experian.co.uk/crain

Fraud protection

The personal information Legal & General collects from you may be shared with fraud prevention agencies who will use it to prevent fraud and money laundering and to verify your identity.

If we identify that false or inaccurate information has been provided and fraud is identified, we will pass to fraud prevention agencies. Law enforcement agencies may access and use this information. We may also share information about you with other organisations and public bodies, including the police and we may check and/ or file your details with fraud prevention agencies and databases.

If fraud is detected, you could be refused certain services, finance or employment. Further details of how your information will be used by us and these fraud prevention agencies can be found by accessing these links:

• CIFAS - org.uk/fpn
• National Hunter - co.uk/privacypolicy

Legal & General and other organisations may also access and use this information to prevent fraud and money laundering, for example, when:

• Checking details on applications for credit and credit related or other facilities.
• Managing credit and credit related accounts or facilities.
• Recovering debt.
• Checking details on proposals and claims for all types of insurance.
• Checking sources of income and tax details.

Legal & General and other organisations may access and use the information recorded by fraud prevention agencies. Please contact our Group Financial Crime department if you wish to receive the relevant details of the fraud prevention agencies:

Email: financial.crime@landg.com

Address: Legal & General Group Financial Crime, Four Central Square, Cardiff, CF10 1FS

Legal & General may also check the details of other parties related to your contract, including verification of identity. This includes beneficiaries, trustees, settlors, third party premium payers, executors or administrators of your estate, parties with power of attorney and any other beneficial owner.

Protecting your data outside the UK

The data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the UK, to third-party suppliers, delegates or agents. We’ll take all reasonably necessary steps to make sure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this privacy notice, to ensure your personal information is handled with the same protections that we apply ourselves.

We’ll only transfer your data to a recipient outside the UK where we’re permitted to do so by law, for instance: (a) where the transfer is based on standard data protection clauses adopted or approved by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office; (b) where the transfer is to a territory that is deemed ‘adequate’ by the UK; or (c) where the recipient is subject to an approved certification mechanism and the personal information is subject to appropriate safeguards, etc.

Contacts and Complaints

If you have any questions about this privacy policy or wish to exercise any of your rights, including changing your marketing preferences, please get in touch with your usual Legal & General contact or your customer services team. Alternatively, you can also use the relevant Contact Us section of our website.

If you have any concerns about the way we process your personal data, or are not happy with the way we’ve handled a request by you in relation to your rights, you also have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner's Office. Their address is:

First Contact Team
Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
SK9 5AF

Data Protection Officer

Legal & General has appointed a Data Protection Officer to provide independent expert advice and monitor compliance with data protection laws:

Name: Liz Bradley

Email address: Data.Protection@landg.com 

Address: One Coleman Street, London, EC2R 5AA