Privacy Policy

Bizzloans is a business finance comparison and broking service. The agency responsible for your personal information is Bizzloans Ltd of Level 27, PwC Tower, 188 Quay Street, Auckland 1010. We have a privacy officer who is responsible for how we handle personal information.

We are not a lender. We do not lend money and we do not assess or approve applications. Our role is to take what you tell us about your business, match it against the lenders on our panel, and pass your details to the lenders you agree to be referred to. Each lender is a separate agency with its own privacy policy, and once your information is with them, their policy governs how they handle it.

You can contact us about anything in this policy by emailing support@bizzloans.co.nz (please mark it for the attention of our privacy officer), or by writing to the address above.

We collect only what we need to compare finance for you. That usually means:

• Contact details: your name, business email address, phone number, and the region or town you trade in.
• Business details: trading and registered business name, NZBN and company number where you have them, entity type (company, sole trader, partnership or trust), industry, how long you have been trading, and where the business operates.
• Financial details: turnover, the amount and purpose of the finance you want, existing business debts and repayments, assets offered as security, and, where a lender requires it, bank statements, GST returns, tax returns or financial statements.
• Identity and credit information: see section 5.
• Website information: your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you visit, and the campaign or referral source that brought you here. Our cookie policy explains this in more detail.

We do not ask for, and do not want, your online banking passwords. We do not deliberately collect sensitive information such as health details, ethnicity, political opinions or religious beliefs. If you send us something like that unprompted, we will not use it, and we will delete it unless we are required by law to keep it.

Where you give us information about someone else, such as a co-director, a guarantor or a partner, you must have their permission to do so, and you should show them this policy.

Under IPP 1 we only collect personal information for a lawful purpose connected with what we do, and only where we need it for that purpose. We use your information to:

• Compare and arrange finance: working out which lenders are likely to consider your business, preparing and submitting your application to the lenders you choose, and keeping you updated while a lender assesses you.
• Meet our legal obligations: including anti-money laundering and countering financing of terrorism (AML/CFT), fraud prevention and record-keeping requirements, and responding to lawful requests from regulators, courts and law enforcement.
• Run and improve our service: verifying your identity and business details (for example against the NZ Companies Office and NZBN register), preventing fraud, improving our website, understanding which pages and campaigns are useful, and handling complaints.
• Marketing, with your agreement: sending you electronic marketing (see section 8), and setting non-essential cookies (see our cookie policy). You can change your mind at any time.

You do not have to give us your information. But if you want us to actually compare finance for you, we need the details above. Without them we cannot match you to a lender, and no lender will assess you.

Most of the time we collect information directly from you: through the forms and calculator on this site, by phone, by email, or in person. We also collect it from your accountant or bookkeeper where you have asked them to deal with us.

We may also collect information about you from lenders on our panel (for example, the outcome of an application), from public registers such as the NZ Companies Office and NZBN register, from credit reporters where section 5 applies, from identity verification and fraud prevention services, and from referral partners who have your permission to pass your details to us.

To assess an application, the lenders we introduce you to, and where applicable we, may request your personal and business credit information from one or more of the New Zealand credit reporters: Equifax, Centrix and illion. This is done with your authorisation and in line with the Credit Reporting Privacy Code 2020. Some enquiries are “soft” enquiries, which do not affect your credit score. Where a lender proceeds to full assessment it may make a credit application enquiry, which is recorded on your credit report and can be seen by other lenders.

Credit reporters may also be used to verify your identity and to help prevent fraud and money laundering. Under the Code you can ask each credit reporter for a free copy of your credit information, ask for it to be corrected, and in some circumstances ask for a suppression of your credit information if you believe you have been, or are likely to be, a victim of fraud.

Each credit reporter publishes its own privacy policy explaining how it handles credit information. You can find these on the Equifax, Centrix and illion New Zealand websites, or ask us and we will point you to them.

We share your information with:

• Lenders on our panel: this is the main one, and it is the whole point of the service. We only send your details to lenders you have agreed we can approach, and only so they can assess whether they can help you. We do not send your details to every lender on the panel by default.
• Other brokers and introducers: where a lender is only accessible through another intermediary, or where your matter is better handled by a specialist we work with, and you have agreed to that referral.
• Our service providers: the businesses that run our website hosting, customer relationship management, telephony, email, e-signature, bank statement retrieval, identity verification and analytics tools. They hold information on our behalf and may only use it to provide those services to us.
• Credit reporters and fraud prevention services: as described in section 5.
• Your professional advisors: your accountant, bookkeeper or lawyer, where you have asked us to deal with them.
• Courts, regulators and law enforcement: where we are required or permitted by law to disclose it.

We do not sell your personal information and we do not supply it to unrelated third parties for their own marketing.

The Bizzloans brand also operates in Australia and the United Kingdom. Some of our support team are based in the Philippines, and some of the systems we use, including our customer relationship management platform, are operated from Australia. Some of the software we rely on, such as cloud hosting, email and analytics, is supplied by global providers that may store or back up data in other countries, including the United States.

This means your personal information may be disclosed to, and accessed from, people and systems outside New Zealand. Under IPP 12 we only disclose personal information to a foreign person or entity where we reasonably believe it will be protected in a way that, overall, provides comparable safeguards to the Privacy Act 2020, for example through contractual privacy obligations, access controls and confidentiality obligations on the people who handle it. Where a provider is simply storing or processing information for us, we remain responsible for it. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards and the countries involved.

If you have enquired with us, we may send you emails, texts or calls about business finance products, rate changes and guides we think are relevant to you. We send commercial electronic messages in line with the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007, which means relying on your consent, and every message tells you who sent it and how to unsubscribe.

You can stop it at any time. Use the unsubscribe link in any email, reply STOP to any text, tell whoever calls you, or email us at support@bizzloans.co.nz. We will action the request promptly and at no cost to you. Opting out of marketing does not stop us contacting you about a finance application that is in progress.

We do not use information from credit reporters for marketing.

Under IPP 5 we take reasonable steps to protect your personal information from loss, misuse, and unauthorised access, use, modification or disclosure. In practice that means encrypted connections to this website, access controls so that staff only see what they need to do their job, reputable hosting and CRM providers, and secure disposal of records we no longer need.

No system is perfect, and email in particular is not a secure channel. Please do not send us bank statements or identity documents by ordinary email if we have given you a secure upload link instead.

If we have a privacy breach that it is reasonable to believe has caused, or is likely to cause, serious harm, it is a notifiable privacy breach. We will notify the Office of the Privacy Commissioner and the people affected as soon as practicable.

We keep your information only as long as we need it for a lawful purpose, or as long as the law requires, whichever is longer. As a guide:

• Enquiries that go nowhere: kept for up to 2 years, then deleted or anonymised.
• Applications and completed loans: kept for at least 5 years after our relationship with you ends, in line with AML/CFT and tax record-keeping requirements, and longer where we need it to deal with a claim or complaint.
• Marketing contact details: kept until you opt out, plus a suppression record so we can honour that opt-out.

When we no longer need information and no law requires us to keep it, we delete it or anonymise it.

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you have the right to:

• know whether we hold personal information about you (IPP 6);
• access the personal information we hold about you (IPP 6);
• ask us to correct information you believe is wrong, and, if we do not agree to correct it, ask us to attach a statement of the correction you sought (IPP 7);
• expect us to take reasonable steps to check information is accurate, up to date and complete before we use or disclose it (IPP 8); and
• opt out of marketing at any time (see section 8).

To make a request, email support@bizzloans.co.nz. We may need to confirm your identity first, because we will not hand personal information to the wrong person. There is no charge, and we will respond as soon as reasonably practicable and no later than 20 working days after we receive your request. If we have already passed information to a lender and we then correct it, we will tell that lender where it is reasonable to do so.

If you think we have mishandled your information, tell us first. Most things are sorted out quickly once someone actually looks at them.

• Email support@bizzloans.co.nz, marked for the attention of our privacy officer; or
• use the complaints option on our contact page.

We will acknowledge your complaint within 5 working days, tell you who is handling it, and give you a written answer within 20 working days. If we need longer, we will tell you why and keep you posted.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, which deals with privacy complaints in New Zealand. Its service is free.

• Online: privacy.org.nz
• Phone: 0800 803 909

For a complaint about what is recorded on your credit report, you can also contact the credit reporter concerned.

We may update this policy. The version published on this page is the one that applies, and the date at the top tells you when it last changed. If we make a change that materially affects how we handle your information, we will make that clear rather than quietly swapping the page.

You can ask for a copy of this policy in another format, printed or plain text, and we will provide it free of charge.