Saffery (Suisse) SA and its associated companies are committed to protecting the privacy and security of your personal information. For the purposes of this Privacy Notice we will describe our group operating companies under the collective term ‘SCSSA’ which includes jointly and severally;
- Saffery (Suisse) SA a company whose registered office is at Rue de la Confédération 5, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland ; and
- Rysaffe Fiduciaires SARL a company whose registered office is at Rue de la Confédération 5, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland ; and
- Rysaffe Adminstrateurs SARL whose registered office is at Rue de la Confédération 5, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland; and
- Rysaffe Actionnaires SARL whose registered office is at Rue de la Confédération 5, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland; and
- Rysaffe Secretaires SARL whose registered office is at Rue de la Confédération 5, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland; and
- where the context so admits includes all associated companies providing accounting services, corporate director services, company secretarial services, nominee shareholder services, trustee and fiduciary services, fund administration services and all or any ancillary or related services in connection with the administration of Client Entities and the Employees.
All employees of SSSA are responsible for maintaining and ensuring the confidentiality of all personal information to which they have access. All employees must assume and maintain obligations of confidentiality and non-disclosure as per their contractual employment agreement. These obligations will endure beyond the cessation of employment.
All employees are required to undertake mandatory data protection training on a regular basis to emphasise their responsibilities and obligations in maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of your personal information.
Personal data shall mean any information relating to a person who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity. It does not include data where the identity has been removed (anonymous data). There are ‘special categories’ of more sensitive personal data that require a higher level of protection.
SSSA will typically gather the personal information about you through our client take-on process and on-boarding process, either directly from you as you complete our mandatory forms, from a third party advisor(such as your lawyer), from publicly available sources or a subscription identification verification database. We also collect or generate personal data when you communicate with our staff, sign up to receive information by e-mail, or participate at a meeting, seminar or any other event and in the course of providing our services, and we may collect personal data from other sources for example to keep your information up to date using publically available sources.
SSSA may collect, store, and use the following categories of personal information about you:
- Personal contact details including name, title, addresses, telephone numbers, and personal email addresses.
- Former names.
- Date of birth.
- Place of birth.
- Nationality.
- Passport number and country of issue.
- Tax Identification Number.
- Tax Residency.
- Occupation, name of employer, nature of employment.
- Business address.
- Whether you have held a public position or office.
- Source of funds, source of wealth information.
- Copy of driving licence or ID card, where applicable.
We may also collect, store and use the following ‘special categories’ of more sensitive personal information:
- Information about your health, including any medical condition, health and sickness records.
- Information about criminal convictions and offences.
SSSA is responsible for deciding how we hold and use personal information and is required under data protection legislation to notify you of the information contained in this privacy notice.
SSSA will comply with the relevant data protection laws. This means that the personal information SSSA will hold about you will be:
- Used lawfully, fairly and in a transparent way.
- Collected only for valid purposes that we have clearly explained to you and not used in any way that is incompatible with those purposes.
- Relevant to the purposes we have told you about and limited only to those purposes.
- Accurate and kept up to date.
- Kept only as long as necessary for the specific purposes.
- Kept securely.
We use your personal data:
- to communicate with you;
- to provide and improve our services to you and our customers, including personal data of others provided to us or collected by us on behalf of our clients, for example processing identification and background information as part of our on-boarding, finance, administration and marketing processes;
- to administer our relationship with you and with our customers;
- to provide and improve our websites, including monitoring and evaluating its use (see “Use of our websites and e-mails” below for additional information); to promote our services, including by sending alerts, updates, event invitations etc.;
- appoint property or other asset manager and agents;
- appointment of third parties who may have their own due diligence requirements;
- to comply with our legal, fiscal, regulatory and risk management obligations, including establishing, exercising or defending legal claims.
Most commonly, we will use your personal information in the following circumstances:
- To verify your identity and protect against fraud and to fulfil our Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism obligations.
- Where it is necessary to perform the contract we have entered into with you.
- Where it is necessary to comply with a legal obligation.
- Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests (or those of a third party) and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests.
We may also use your personal information in the following situations, which are likely to be rare:
- Where we need to protect your interests (or someone else’s interests).
- Where it is needed in the public interest (or for official purposes).
We may only process information relating to unlawful activity where the law allows us to do so. We will use financial crime or other background check agencies to screen you as part of the client take-on process, or we may be notified of such information directly by you in the course of our business relationship. We will use information about unlawful activity to fulfil our Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the financing of Terrorism obligations.
On what basis we use your personal information:
We process personal data on the following grounds: to perform a contract (article 6 para. 1 (b) GDPR), such as engaging with an individual to provide legal or other services; for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims or proceedings; to comply with legal and regulatory obligations (article 6 para. 1 (c) GDPR); and for legitimate interests (article 6 para. 1 (f) GDPR).
If you fail to provide certain information when requested, we may not be able to provide the services you have required, as this may prevent us from complying with our legal obligations such as to fulfil our Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism obligations.
SSSA is committed to retaining the accuracy of your personal information for as long as it is being used for the purposes set out in the policy, and provided that you keep SSSA up to date. Prompt notification of any changes, such as your address, email address or telephone number, will help us provide you with the best possible service. Should you discover, upon a review of the personal information that you have provided, that amendments are required, please advise us immediately. We will make our best efforts to advise others of any important amendments to your personal information that we may have released to them.
Your personal information will solely be used for the purposes for which we have collected it, unless we reasonably consider that we need to use it for another reason and if that reason is compatible with the original purpose. If we need to use your personal information for an unrelated purpose, we will notify you and we will explain the legal rationale, which permits us to do so.
Please note that we may process your personal information without your knowledge or consent, in compliance with the above rules, where this is required or permitted by law.
’Special categories’ of particularly sensitive personal information require higher levels of protection. We need to have further justification for collecting, storing and using this type of personal information. We may process special categories of personal information in the following circumstances:
- In limited circumstances, but only with your explicit written consent.
- Where we need to carry out our legal obligations and in line with our Privacy Policy.
Less commonly, we may process this type of information where it is required in relation to legal claims or where it is needed to protect your interests (or another person’s interests) and you are incapable of giving your consent, or where you have already made the information public.
We are required by law to determine whether the use of your personal data carries a high risk of ‘physical, material or non-material damage’ to you. We have put in place procedures to assess whether the use of your personal data is considered to be high-risk. In the unlikely event that the use of your personal data is considered to be ‘high risk’ our Data Protection Officer shall take certain measures to address such risk and any suspected data breach shall be notified to you immediately where we are required by law to do so.
We do not need your consent if we use special categories of your personal information to carry out our legal obligations. In limited circumstances, we may approach you (or your representative) for written consent to allow us to process certain particularly sensitive data. If we do so, we will provide full details of the information that we would like and the reason we need it, so that you may consider if you wish to consent.
Automated decision-making takes place when an electronic system uses personal information to make a decision without human intervention. We do not envisage that any decisions will be taken about you using automated means, however we will notify you in writing if this position changes.
‘Third parties’ includes third-party service providers (including contractors and designated agents) and other Saffery offices. The following are examples of the types of activities that may be carried out by third-party service providers:
- Archive data storage.
- Registered office/agent facilities.
- Legal advice.
- Tax advice.
- Investment advice.
- Banking and brokerage services.
- Asset Management Services
Data will be shared with third parties, including third-party service providers and other Saffery offices. Third parties will be obliged to respect the security of your data and to treat it in accordance with the law in the jurisdiction in which they operate. Information will only be shared with Third Parties when SSSA is required by law to do so or in order to provide the requested services.
All our third-party service providers are required to take appropriate security measures to protect your personal information in line with the relevant law in their jurisdiction. We only permit them to process your personal data for specified purposes and in accordance with our instructions. We may share your personal information with other Saffery offices to provide services during the course of our business relationship (such as registered office/agent or tax advice).
In order to provide the requested services, we may transfer your personal data to recipients abroad, including in countries that do not provide the same level of protection as Swiss law. We may also transfer personal data with your explicit consent and in certain other situations as permitted by applicable law.
Our website uses Google Analytics, a service provided by Google, Inc. that tracks and reports on the manner in which our websites are used. Google Analytics does this by placing small text files called “cookies” on your computer or other device. Cookies collect information about the number of visitors to the websites, the pages visited and the time spent on the websites. This information is aggregated and not personally identifiable.
We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal information from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. In addition, we limit access to your personal information to those employees, agents, contractors and other third parties who have a business need to know. They will only process your personal information on our instructions and where they have agreed to treat the information confidentially and keep secure. SSSA has put in place procedures to deal with any suspected data security breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a suspected breach where we are legally required to do so.
We are obliged to retain your personal information for the duration of our contractual and legal obligations. The length of time we retain your personal information will depends on:
- the purposes for which we process your personal data.
- any legal or regulatory requirement we may have to meet.
Under Swiss law, SSSA has an obligation to retain all documents for a period of 10 years after the termination of the relationship. We must also be able to respond to any concerns you may have, even if you are no longer a client. We have retention policies in place that govern the destruction of personal information. Once our legal obligations are completed, we will securely destroy your personal information in accordance with our data retention policy and applicable laws and regulations.
a) You are entitled to:
- Request access to your personal information (commonly known as a ‘data subject access request’). This enables you to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to check that we are lawfully processing it.
- Request correction of the personal information that we hold about you. This enables you to have any incomplete or inaccurate information we hold about you corrected.
- Request erasure of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to delete or remove personal information where there is no good reason for us continuing to process it. You also have the right to ask us to delete or remove your personal information where you have exercised your right to object to processing (see below).
- Object to processing of your personal information where we are relying on a legitimate interest (or those of a third party) and there is something about your particular situation that makes you want to object to processing on this ground.
- Request the restriction of processing of your personal information. This enables you to ask us to suspend the processing of personal information about you, for example if you want us to establish its accuracy or the reason for processing it.
- Request the transfer of your personal information to another party.
b) If you choose to exercise this right, SSSA reserves the right to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity and ensure your right to access the information (or to exercise any of your other rights). This is another appropriate security measure to ensure that personal information is not disclosed to any person who is not entitled to receive it.
c) If you want to review, verify, correct or request erasure of your personal information, object to the processing of your personal data, or request that we transfer a copy of your personal information to another party, please contact our Data Protection Officer in writing.
d) If you want to withdraw consent from the limited circumstances where you may have provided your consent to the collection, processing and transfer of your personal information for a specific purpose, you have the right to withdraw your consent for that specific processing at any time. To withdraw your consent, please contact our Data Protection Officer. Once we have received notification that you have withdrawn your consent, we will no longer process your information for the purpose or purposes you originally agreed to, unless we have another legitimate basis for doing so in law.
e) SSSA will not charge you any additional fees to access to your personal information if your request is substantiated and you wish to exercise your rights. However, we may charge a reasonable fee if your request for access is clearly unfounded or excessive. Alternatively, we may refuse to comply with the requests that we deem unfounded or excessive.
This Notice does not form part of any contract to provide services.
We reserve the right to update this Privacy Notice at any time, and we will provide you with a new Privacy Notice when we make any substantial updates. We may also notify you in other ways from time to time about the processing of your personal information.
Last modified August 2019.
We have appointed a Data Protection Officer to oversee compliance with this Privacy Notice.
If you have any questions about this Privacy Notice or how we handle your personal information, please contact the following:
Daniel Hawson – Data Protection Officer
Saffery (Suisse) SA
Rue de la Confédération 5,
1204 Geneva, Switzerland
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: +41 22 319 0956