Hitachi Capital (UK) PLC (the Company) is committed to protecting the privacy of your personal information. For the purpose of applicable data protection law, including the Data Protection Acts 1998 and 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) (together, DP Law), the Company is the data controller. You will see the Company referred to as Hitachi and Hitachi Personal Finance on the site. Our Privacy Notice explains what we do with any personal information which we collect from you, including when you use  our website and when you interact with us in other ways offline, for example during the credit application process. If you have any questions regarding our Privacy Notice, please contact us at the address on the Contact Us page of this site or email us at dataprotection@hitachicapital.co.uk.

This Privacy Notice explains how we collect, use and disclose personal information about you when you visit the site and when you contact us, whether by e-mail, post, fax or telephone using the contact options on the site. The information you provide to us may then be shared with other companies in the Hitachi Capital (UK) PLC group (see below all companies that form the “Group”). Where we refer to the Company, this will also include the Group unless we explain otherwise.”

Our business is diverse so we have created a separate privacy notice for each of the following Hitachi Capital business units:

• Hitachi Capital Business Finance (including Franchise Finance)
• Hitachi Capital Consumer Finance
• Hitachi Capital European Vendor Solutions
• Hitachi Capital Invoice Finance
• Hitachi Capital Vehicle Solutions

The personal information we collect from you is used primarily to enable us to provide the specific service you require and to help you access your account, securely.  

Personal information can include the following:

• your title, forename and surname and gender;
• your personal or work related (depending on which you choose to submit) e-mail address and your password (which allow us to create your user account and your unique agreement number);
• your personal or work related contact details (depending on which you choose to submit) such as your telephone number(s), fax numbers and postal address;
• your date of birth and national insurance number;
• your marital status;
• your residential status and address details for the last 3 years;
• occupation, salary and annual income information;
• employment status;
• employer details and time periods in that occupation and with that employer and any other employers within a 3 year period;
• your bank details, including your bank name and address, sort code, account number, account type and time period at your bank;
• personal information which we obtain from Fraud Prevention Agencies (see the section on ‘Fraud Prevention Agencies’ below);
• personal information about your credit history which we obtain from Credit Reference Agencies including data which originates from Royal Mail (UK postal addresses), local authorities (electoral roll), the insolvency service, Companies’ House, other lenders and providers of credit (who supply data to the CRAs), court judgments decrees and administration orders made publicly available through statutory public registers (see the section on ‘Credit Reference Agencies’ below);
• your contact and marketing preferences;
• if you take a survey or interact with us in various other ways - demographics information and information about subjects that may interest you;
• information necessary for compliance with law and regulation; and/or
• where you "like" us or make posts on our pages on social networking websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. 

Personal information also includes special categories of personal data. This is data about your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical believes, trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data, and data concerning your health, sex life or sexual orientation.  In the unlikely event that any of this is collected from you during your use of the website or during any other offline interaction with us you may be asked at the point of collection to provide your explicit consent where needed in order to justify our processing of it.  

This information will be collected primarily from you as information voluntarily provided to us, but (as explained above) we may also collect it where lawful to do so from (and combine it with information from) credit reference and fraud prevention agencies, public sources, third party service providers (such as Experian Limited trading as HD Decisions who will conduct a soft credit search as part of our “Check my Eligibility” service), tax or law enforcement agencies and other third parties. Also, some of the personal information obtained from Credit Reference Agencies will have originated from publicly accessible sources. In particular, Credit Reference Agencies draw on court decisions, bankruptcy registers and the electoral register (also known as the electoral roll).  We explain more about Credit Reference Agencies below.  We have also mentioned above in the lists of personal information that we process some of the CRAs’ other sources of information (which are our own source of information too).   We may also collect personal information about you from your use of other Company or Group websites or services.

This will include (as relevant):

• processing your personal information so that we may perform our obligations under a contract with you (such as a loan agreement with you) (“Your Contract”);
• processing for legitimate interests provided these are not overridden by your interests and fundamental rights and freedoms (this includes our own legitimate interests and those of other entities and branches in our Group). For example, this is relevant when we use and process your personal data to deal with our legal and regulatory and internal governance obligations; and in addition to/together with the processing condition described below (“Legitimate Interests”),
• processing which is necessary for compliance with our legal obligations laid down by European Union law (where relevant) and by laws and regulation applicable to us in the United Kingdom (“Our Legal Obligations”).
• Your consent may also be a lawful reason for processing your personal data in certain cases (“Your Consent”). This means your freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous consent which may be collected from you, for instance when you agree to receive marketing communications from us or when you agree to take part in surveys or market research. You should be aware that you are entitled under DP Law to withdraw your consent where you have given it to us at any time. If you do this and if there is no alternative lawful reason for us to rely on to justify our use or other processing on your personal data, this may affect our ability to provide you with some of our services.    

In summary, we need certain categories of personal data in order to provide you with our services. Certain other personal data is processed for our Legitimate Interests in cases where this does not result in prejudice to you. Certain other personal data is processed based on a consent.