Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

 

Background

This policy sets out how and why SVP Group Pty Ltd ACN 145 613 323 and its subsidiaries (which we refer to collectively as SV Partners) collect, use, hold and disclose your personal information for the purposes of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act).  Details of some of the companies that make up ‘SV Partners’ are set out towards the end of this policy.   Each of those companies are referred to as a member in this policy. 

If a member of SV Partners has its own privacy policy governing the handling of personal information, that Member’s privacy policy will apply to the extent that it is inconsistent with this policy.  We encourage you to review each member’s privacy policy before disclosing any personal information.

In this policy, we, us, or our refers to each member of SV Partners, unless the context indicates otherwise.  This policy does not apply to any information that is not ‘personal information’ as defined in the Privacy Act, or where the Privacy Act does not apply in relevant circumstances or to your personal information (such as where were have a formal insolvency appointment and insolvency laws prescribe different standards or obligations apply in those circumstances).

 

Our commitment to you

We are committed to being transparent about our management of your personal information and take all reasonable steps to ensure our practices and procedures relating to our activities comply with any applicable requirements in the Privacy Act. 

We do so by striving to adhere to the following principles:

• your personal information will be collected, stored, used and disclosed in accordance with all applicable privacy laws;
• your personal information will generally only be used where necessary for us to deliver our products or services or perform other reasonably necessary business functions and activities.

We will not use or disclose your personal information for purposes unrelated to our business’ services and activities, unless we first obtain your consent or where doing so would not breach applicable privacy laws. 

By engaging with our business or by providing your personal information to us, you consent to our collection, storage, use and disclosure of your personal information, in accordance with this policy. 

 

Why do we need personal information?

We often require your personal information in order to conduct our business and provide our products and services to you as part of our business activities. 

Our members conduct various business activities, including providing advice and services in relation to insolvency matters and appointments (such bankruptcies, liquidations, receiverships and other formal appointments), informal or pre-insolvency matters and turnaround management as well as other business and personal advisory matters.  Some of our members also conduct business activities that are not related to the insolvency space, such as Smart Fee Pty Ltd which provides professional fee funding services.  We refer to our business activities as our Services in this policy.

In order to conduct our business and provide our Services most effectively, we will be required to rely on the collection of personal information that is provided to us.  Some of the reasons why such personal information may be required include the following:

• to enable us to provide accurate advice and our Services to you, including to allow us to tailor our Services and provide more personalised Services;
• to provide updates, newsletters and the like to you where you have subscribed for same;
• to allow us to better understand the needs of our clients, business partners and those that we deal with as part of our Services;
• to enable us to properly perform the Services even where you are not our client, for example we may collect your personal information if you are a creditor of a bankrupt estate or liquidation that one of our staff members are appointed to;
• for internal processes and operations, such as data analytics, record keeping, training, compliance and reporting and for insurance purposes;
• to continually enhance and improve our Services and our service offering, as well as allowing us to notify our clients and those we deal with regarding new Services that are available where we consider they may be interested in those new Services; and
• to comply with all applicable laws and regulations in fulfilling our obligations to our clients and other businesses and persons we deal with.

We refer to the above matters and the other purposes for which we may collect and handle your personal information as our Activities in this policy.  Our Activities also include any functions or purposes that we may specify to you from time to time (including when collecting your personal  information), as well as any other functions or purposes that you provide us with the relevant personal information.

We may also need personal information to perform functions that are incidental to, or are otherwise reasonably necessary for us to, operate our business, conduct our Activities or provide our Services.

In order to achieve the above, we rely on you to provide us with accurate information to enable us to conduct our Activities.

 

Collecting your personal information

What personal information might we collect?

The types of personal information we may collect, hold, use or disclose will depend on your interactions with us.  Examples of the types of personal information we collect are set out below. 

Personal information you provide to us directly: we may collect and hold personal information you provide to us directly.  For example, such personal information may include:

• Contact or identification information: names (such as your name if you are our client, a bankrupt or a company officer for the purposes of our Services), delivery or correspondence addresses (such as postal or email addresses), phone numbers, dates of birth, nationality, languages, your driver’s licence or passport for insolvency matters and, if you contact us via social media, then we may record your social media account;
• Payment information: bank accounts details, credit or debit card details (such as for clients who are to make payments to us for our Services or creditors who are to receive payments from us in respect of insolvency appointments), payment history details and associated transaction details;
• Information obtained in relation to insolvency matters: various types of information in connection with insolvency matters we undertake, which may include details of debts you owe (and that are owed to you), copies of agreements you have with third parties, employment related information (including details of your earnings), tax related information and other information that is usual to obtain in connection with insolvency matters; and
• Product information: personal information related to client preferences and interests, information relevant to client surveys or offers or information in respect of requirements for our Services or similar matters.

Information about others: You might need to provide information about other persons to us (e.g. about your spouse, dependents or other family members).  If so, we rely on you to have informed those persons that you are giving their information to us and to have advised them about this privacy policy and how they can obtain a copy of it.

Sensitive information you provide:  We will generally not collect ‘sensitive information’ (as defined in the Privacy Act) from you unless you provide that information to us directly.  However, we may collect sensitive information in relation to insolvency appointments directly from third parties in order to conduct our Activities.  For example, if you are a bankrupt and one of our staff members is appointed as the trustee of your bankrupt estate, then we may obtain your tax file number and other sensitive information from third parties to discharge the duties imposed on trustees in bankruptcy.  

Information from third parties:  We may collect personal information about you from third parties, such as where your accountant, agent or a person requesting Services on your behalf provides us with your personal information or where us or our insurers are investigating a claim in respect of our Services.   We may also collect information of the kind referred to above in relation to insolvency matters from third parties.

Information we create using your personal information:  We may develop information using your personal information.  For example, where you make a complaint, we may develop and keep a record of the complaint which may contain your personal information. We may develop information in the form of internal quality assurance reports, evaluative reports regarding our sales targets, client satisfaction data or record of interactions, file notes and/or any recorded phone conversations with you that may be kept for quality assurance purposes. 

Information we collect automatically: We may collect personal information about you automatically when you visit our websites, such as your IP address and device type. Some of this information may be collected using cookies and similar tracking technologies.

Public information:  We may collect personal information from publicly available sources such as ASIC records, credit history details and other information from government agency databases.

Credit information:  We may collect credit related information (including your credit history, where you consent to this or where we are entitled to request this information without your consent).  We are likely to do this where you are proposing to borrow monies or obtain credit from one of our group members, such as Smart Fee Pty Ltd. 

 

How do we collect your personal information?

Information we request

Our general practice is to collect information directly from you, as and when required, such as when you provide us with your personal information in the course of us providing our Services, where you provide the information in response to requests in connection with insolvency appointments and in other situations.

We may also to collect personal information from you during your discussions with us either via, email (i.e. when you email us with your queries), telephone (i.e. when you might call us with your queries), web queries (i.e. when you interact with our website), through in person discussions, through online forms, contracts, and/or social media networking platforms (such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook). 

You have the option not to provide any personal information that we request.  Depending upon what information you do not wish to provide, we may not be able to deal with you or your requests further on a particular matter.  For instance, if you make a complaint but refuse to provide your contact information, then we may not be able to process or escalate your complaint. Where you provide us with personal information on request, we do so on the understanding that you consent to our collection because you have this option to refuse to provide that information. 

You may have the option not to identify yourself or identify yourself by a pseudonym.  However, this is not generally practical for us as we need to know who you are in order to contact and liaise with you and to address your requests, to ensure that you are authorised to provide the information to us and in order to best provide our Services or conduct our Activities.  For example, if you are a client needing our Services, we will need to know who you are so that we know who we are entering into a contract with, so we can contact you to clarify any information that may have been provided.  Further, we may need your legal name in respect of any insolvency appointments, as we are generally required to know who we are dealing with in those circumstances. 

Personal information we do not request

Sometimes you may voluntarily provide us with personal information that we have not requested.  If this happens, we may use and disclose the personal information in order to determine whether we could have collected the information had we requested it.  If we consider that we could not have collected the personal information, then we may either destroy or de-identify that personal information as soon as reasonably practical where required by law.

 

Holding your personal information

Your personal information may be stored in hard copy, electronically or both.  We do not adopt or use any identifiers that a government agency may have assigned to you, save for in respect of insolvency appointments (such as storing information in relation to bankrupt estates by reference to the formal estate number assigned by the Australian Financial Security Authority). 

Electronic information may be stored on our computer systems and networks and on our customer relationship management platforms, our accounting platforms and our email platforms.  Our digital systems are protected by mechanisms which may include passwords, firewalls, antivirus software, scheduled password changes, and internal monitoring, depending on the relevant system.

Where we store your personal information, we take reasonable steps to ensure it is protected from misuse, interference, loss or unauthorised access, modification or disclosure.  However, we cannot guarantee that this will never occur.  If a serious data breach occurs, and we believe your personal information has been compromised, we will assess the breach as soon as we become aware of it and take all reasonable and necessary steps as prescribed under Australian privacy laws.

We also take reasonable steps to destroy or permanently de-identify personal information that we no longer need for any purpose as required by law.

 

Retention of personal information

The amount of time we may keep your personal information will depend on the circumstances and whether we have an ongoing business need to retain it (such as whether we have agreed to provide you with Services, whether we need to retain it due to legal requirements such as financial reporting legislation, insolvency laws or the like).

We will retain your personal information for as long as we have a relationship with you and for a period of time afterwards where we have an ongoing business need to retain it, in accordance with our internal retention policies and practices.  Following that period, we will take steps to make sure such personal information is deleted or anonymised where required by law.

 

Using your personal information

We may use your personal information to perform our Activities (as outlined above) or any activities that are related (or in the case of sensitive information, directly related) to the performance of our Activities.  We may do these things without your prior consent where the law allows or requires us to do, including where it is impracticable for us to obtain your consent. 

We may provide your personal information to law enforcement agencies and regulatory authorities where required from time to time.  We may also provide your personal information to third parties such as our professional advisors, third-party service providers, any payment providers or any sub-contractors, where they are providing services to us and such personal information is necessary for them to provide those services.

Do we use your personal information for direct marketing?

We may use your personal information to directly market our Services to you.  This marketing material may be sent by email, SMS, phone or post.  We may also use personal information collected about you from other individuals for these purposes where it is impracticable to obtain your consent in advance. 

You may ‘opt-out’ or raise any concerns you may have regarding these messages by contacting us through our website or by ‘unsubscribing’ to such emails, SMS messages or any such marketing, where such an option is made available.

 

Disclosing your personal information

When may we disclose your personal information?

We may disclose your personal information to perform our Activities or any functions that are related (or in the case of sensitive information, directly related) to the performance of those Activities.  This may include disclosing personal information to:

• our related entities where reasonably required to operate their respective businesses, including to facilitate the collection of debts on behalf of our related entities or enforce their rights under any agreement between our related entities and us;
• business partners, suppliers and sub-contractors for the performance of any contract we enter into with them or you that relates to our Services or Activities;
• third-party service providers or contractors that we engage, such as those that provide our cloud-based computing systems, transport and delivery services or our IT contractors, but we will usually only do this where those third parties are accessing our records generally to help us with any issues we are having, or where specifically needed in connection with any supply of our Services to you;
• analytics and search engine providers that assist us in improving and optimising your use of our website.

As the members of SV Partners have shared premises, staff, systems and other material, information provided to one member of SV Partners may be shared with and accessible by other members of SV Partners.  Accordingly, by providing a member of SV Partners with your personal information, you acknowledge that it may be shared with other members of SV Partners. 

We will not otherwise disclose personal information unless we believe we have reasonable grounds to do so or that we reasonably believe you have provided your authorisation for us to do so. You should be aware however, that we may be required to disclose personal information without your consent in order to comply with any court orders, subpoenas or any other legal process or investigation including by tax authorities, if such disclosure is required by law.   

We may also share your personal information where we consider it is required in order to comply with the duties imposed upon our staff in connection with formal or informal insolvency appointments.  For example, where you are a creditor of a person or company where our staff have a formal insolvency appointment, we may include details of the fact that you are a creditor in reports that we provide to creditors.

Are we likely to disclose personal information to overseas recipients?

We do not intend to disclose personal information overseas, unless you have provided the information to us for that purpose, where we are providing Services to you overseas, where you have contacted us from overseas or where required by law. 

However, there are some circumstances where we may disclose personal information overseas such as where we use secure cloud storage services that may have servers located overseas of when you communicate with us through a social network service (e.g. Facebook), and the social network provider and its partners may collect and hold your personal information overseas.

We may also need to comply with overseas authorities in the event you (or those who you represent) also carry on business overseas and an overseas authority issues us with a valid court order, subpoena or other such legal demand to cooperate with their legal investigations with respect to you.

Credit related disclosures

We may disclose your credit related information where you have consented to this or where we are permitted (or required) by law to do so.  For example, if you borrow monies or obtain credit from one of our members (such as Smart Fee Pty Ltd), we may notify credit reporting bodies or other credit providers of a default, including one that may be listed on a credit file.  If there is a payment owing to us of more than $150 that is more than 60 days overdue, we may list a default on your credit file (unless the law requires us not to), and that process involves disclosing your personal information.  We may exchange information with other credit providers as to the status of a credit account and to assess your credit worthiness with a credit reporting body.  

 

How can you access and correct your personal information?

It is primarily your responsibility to ensure that the information you provide to us is accurate, complete and up-to-date. We may periodically review your information to ensure that it is accurate, up-to-date, complete and relevant.  Where we have reason to believe that your information may not be accurate, up-to-date, complete or relevant then we may either attempt to contact you to correct the information or deidentify or destroy the personal information as required by law.

You may request access to the personal information we hold about you, or request that we update or correct any personal information we hold about you or ask us to restrict or cease processing your personal information or even delete your personal information, by setting out your request in writing and sending it by contacting us through our website.

Where you make a request to access your personal information, we will do our best to respond within a reasonable period.  While we may allow access and provide the means by which you can access your personal information, we may refuse the request where we are entitled to do so under the Privacy Act or at law.  In this event, we will tell you the grounds for this refusal as well as suggested steps which may allow you to access your personal information in the circumstances of our refusal.  You may complain about this refusal by making a complaint as set out below.

 

External links

Our website or communications with you (such as marketing emails) may contain links to other websites that are not under our control. If you follow a link to any of these websites, please note that any personal information you provided via those websites (whether voluntary or not) is not covered by this policy, as these websites may have their own privacy policies and the websites may use cookies or other features that access your personal information (whether disclosed or not).

We take no responsibility for linked websites and provide them solely for your personal information and convenience. We disclaim any responsibility for their content, privacy practices and terms of use and we make no endorsements, representations or warranties regarding their accuracy, content and thoroughness.

 

Cookies and similar matters

We want our website to be informative and user friendly.  We use Google Analytics or other third party software to analyse aggregate user behaviour.  We, and Google Analytics and other software use cookies to achieve this aim and for various other reasons which we have detailed in this policy. 

By continuing to use our website you agree to our use of cookies. It is possible to control the use and adjust the cookie settings via your browser settings, but if you do so then you may find that some parts of our website will not function properly. 

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small file created by websites. Cookies may help us analyse web traffic or let you know when you visit a particular website. Cookies allow web applications to respond to you and let our website tailor its operation to your needs, likes and dislikes by gathering and remembering information about you. We use cookies help us to provide you with a better website.

These cookies are not used to grant SV Partners access to your personal information. Non-identifiable information (such as the pages you visit) may be tracked.  By directing your browser to delete your cookies, this data will be erased. For more information about Google Analytics, please follow the links provided on our website.

What cookies do we use?

Our website uses persistent and session cookies.  Persistent cookies allows a website to recognise users when they return to a site and keep certain information on user preferences. These cookies may stay on a computer until they are deleted by the user.  Session cookies allow a website to carry over information from one page to another so that a user does not have to re-enter information. These cookies deleted themselves at the end of the session or at a certain time.

We also use traffic log cookies including third-party partners such as Google to identify which pages are being used. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve our website to tailor it to client needs. These cookies also allow us to display promotional material on other sites you visit across the internet. You can manage your preferences in relation to targeted online advertising directly through digital platforms such as Google or Facebook.

If you would like details of the specific cookies we use on our website, please contact us via the details below. 

 

SV Partners group members

There are various entities that make up the SV Partners group of companies, including (but not limited to) SV Partners Insolvency (QLD) Pty Ltd, SV Partners Insolvency (NSW) Pty Ltd, SV Partners Insolvency (VIC) Pty Ltd, , SV Partners (Services) Pty Ltd, Smart Fee Pty Ltd and Business Savers Pty Ltd.  As mentioned at the outset, this privacy policy applies to all those entities unless they have their own privacy policy. 

 

Your privacy concerns and making a complaint

Contacting Us

If you have any concerns or are unhappy about how your information is handled, please contact us at:

Email:	privacy@svp.com.au
Phone:	(07) 3310 2000
Post:	GPO Box 5300, Brisbane QLD 4001

 

Upon receipt of your concerns, we will designate an appropriate individual within our organisation who will liaise with you regarding the complaint and how it can be resolved.  We will do our best to provide a response to your complaint within 30 days of receipt. If it will take longer, we will contact you to let you know why and ask for more time.

Contacting the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner

If you would like more information regarding Australian privacy laws, or to make a complaint, refer to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner who can be contacted at:

Address:            GPO Box 5218, Sydney NSW 2001

Phone:               1300 363 992

Email:                enquiries@oaic.gov.au

Where can I find out more about my privacy rights?

For further information about privacy and the protection of privacy, visit the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s website at www.oaic.gov.au.

 

Changes to this policy

This policy may be reviewed from time to time to ensure it is accurate, up-to-date and complies with any updates under Australian privacy law. The current policy is published on our website or can be obtained by contacting us using the information above.

Where we amend the terms of this policy from time to time, we will notify you of any changes by posting an updated version of this policy on our website. It is your responsibility to check the website periodically for any changes. 

This policy was last reviewed and updated on 12 August 2022.