Swiss Food Group Data Privacy Notice
February 5th, 2020
- Data protection
Swiss Food Group SA (“SFG“) takes your privacy seriously. SFG adheres to high data protection standards as well as transparency of personal data collection and processing for our clients. This privacy notice contains general information on what personal data SFG collects, what we do with that information, and what rights you have. If you have any questions or comments, please contact info@swissfoodgroup.ch.
‘Personal data’ is any information that relates to an identified or identifiable natural person (rather than to a legal entity, such as a company).
As part of our commitment to protect your personal data in a transparent manner, we want to inform you:
- why and how SFG collects, uses and stores your personal data;
- the lawful basis on which your personal data is processed; and
- what your rights and our obligations are in relation to such processing.
- What types of personal data do we collect?
SFG (also “we”, “our”, or “us”) will, depending on the product or service we provide to you (if any), collect and process personal data about you including:
- personal details such as your name, identification number, date of birth, KYC documents (including a copy of your national identity card or passport), phone number physical and electronic address, and family details such as the name of your spouse, partner, or children;
- financial information, including payment and transaction records and information relating to your assets (including fixed properties), financial statements, liabilities, taxes, revenues, earnings and investments (including your investment objectives and risk tolerance);
- tax domicile and other tax-related documents and information;
- where applicable, professional information about you, such as your job title and work experience;
- your knowledge of and experience in investment matters;
- details of our interactions with you and the products and services you use;
- any records of phone calls between you and SFG ;
- where applicable, details of your nomination of a mandate;
- identifiers we assign to you, such as your client number;
- when you access our Website, data transmitted by your browser and automatically recorded by our server, including date and time of the access, name of the accessed file as well as the transmitted data volume and the performance of the access, your web browser, browser language and requesting domain, and IP address (additional data will only be recorded via our Website if their disclosure is made voluntarily, e.g. in the course of a registration or request); and
- in some cases (where permitted by law), special categories of personal data, such as, to the extent legally possible, information relating to criminal convictions or offences.
In some cases, we collect this information from public registers (which, depending on the product or service you receive, may include beneficial ownership and other registers), public administration or other third-party sources, such as wealth screening services, credit reference agencies, fraud prevention agencies and other SFG entities.
If relevant to the products and services we provide to you, we will also collect information about your additional card holders or account holders, business partners (including other shareholders or beneficial owners), dependants or family members, representatives, and agents. Before providing SFG with this information, you should provide a copy of this notice to those individuals.
- On which legal basis and for which purposes do we process personal data?
3.1. Legal basis for processing
- Depending on the purpose of the processing activity (see section 3.2), the processing of your personal data will be one of the following:
- necessary for the legitimate interests of SFG, without unduly affecting your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms (see below);
- necessary for taking steps to enter into or executing a contract with you for the services or products you request, or for carrying out our obligations under such a contract, such as when we use your data for some of the purposes in sections 3.2(a), (b) (c) and (j) below (as well as certain of the data disclosures described in section 4);
- required to meet our legal or regulatory responsibilities, including when we conduct the checks referred to in section 3.2(a) below and make the disclosures to authorities, regulators and government bodies referred to in sections 3.2(g) and 4 below;
- in some cases, necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest;
- when we use special categories of personal data, necessary for establishing, exercising or defending legal claims or where the processing relates to personal data manifestly in the public domain; and
- in limited circumstances, processed with your consent which we obtain from you from time to time (for instance where required by laws), or processed with your explicit consent in the case of special categories of personal data.
Examples of the ‘legitimate interests’ referred to above are:
- pursuing certain of the purposes in sections 3.2(a) to 3.2(k) below;
- exercising our rights under Articles 26 and 27 of the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation, including our freedom to conduct a business and right to property;
- when we make the disclosures referred to in section 4 below, providing products and services and assuring a consistently high service standard across the SFG, and keeping our customers, employees and other stakeholders satisfied.; and
- meeting our accountability and regulatory requirements around the world, in each case provided such interests are not overridden by your privacy interests.
Any consent SFG has obtained to process ordinary personal data does not apply for the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“EU GDPR”). Instead, for the purposes of the EU GDPR, SFG relies on the lawful grounds of compliance with a legal obligation, contractual necessity or legitimate interests (as specified in this notice) and SFG’s ability to rely on any such consent for the purposes of the EU GDPR is hereby waived or extinguished. For the avoidance of doubt, any consent given for any other reason, for instance (and if applicable) compliance with the Federal Act on Data Protection, the Collective Investment Schemes Act, the Collective Investment Schemes Ordinance, the FINMA Collective Investment Schemes Ordinance, the FINMA Collective Investment Schemes Bankruptcy Ordinance or the banking secrecy provision of the Swiss Federal Act on Banks and Savings Banks remains unaffected by this paragraph.
Where the personal data we collect from you is needed to meet our legal or regulatory obligations or enter into an agreement with you, if we cannot collect this personal data there is a possibility we may be unable to on-board you as a client or provide products or services to you (in which case we will inform you accordingly).
3.2. Purposes of processing
We always process your personal data for a specific purpose and only process the personal data which is relevant to achieve that purpose. In particular, we process personal data for the following purposes:
- client on-boarding processes, including to verify your identity and assess your application (including the need for guarantees or other securitization tools) if you apply for investment, and to conduct legal and other regulatory compliance checks (for example, to comply with anti-money laundering regulations, and prevent fraud);
- providing services to you and ensuring their proper execution, for instance by ensuring that we can identify you and instruct payments to and from your accounts in accordance with your instructions and the product terms;
- managing our relationship with you, including communicating with you in relation to the products and services you obtain from us and from our business partners, handling customer service-related queries and complaints, making decisions regarding your identity;
- helping us to learn more about you as a customer, the products and services you receive, and other services you may be interested in receiving, including profiling based on the processing of your personal data, for instance by looking at the types of services that you use from us, how you like to be contacted and so on;
- taking steps to improve our products and services and our use of technology, including testing and upgrading of systems and processes, and conducting market research to understand how to improve of our existing products and services or learn about other services we can provide;
- contacting you for direct marketing purposes about services we think will be of interest to you, including those offered by us and our other business partners, and facilitating competitions and promotions;
- meeting our on-going regulatory and compliance obligations (e.g. laws of the financial sector, anti-money-laundering and tax laws), including in relation to recording and monitoring communications, disclosures to tax authorities, financial service regulators and other regulatory and governmental bodies, and investigating or preventing crime;
- ensuring the safety of our customers, employees and other stakeholders;
- undertaking transactional and statistical analysis, and related research;
- underwriting for the SFG’s prudent operational management (including risk management, insurance, audit, systems and products training and similar administrative purposes); and
- any other purposes we notify to you from time to time.
- Who has access to personal data and with whom are they shared?
4.1. Third Parties
When providing products and services to you, we will share personal data with persons acting on your behalf or otherwise involved in the transaction (depending on the type of product or service you receive from us), including, where relevant the following types of companies.
- a party assuming risk in or in connection with, the transaction (such as an insurer);
- companies in which you have an interest in;
- payment recipients, beneficiaries, account nominees, intermediaries, and correspondent and agent banks;
- market counterparties;
- other financial institutions, such as fund administrators, custodian banks;
- any third-party service providers such as law firms, tax advisors, fund manager who provides asset co-management services to you; and
- any introducing broker.
4.2. Service providers
In some instances, we also share personal data with our suppliers, including other business partners who provide services to us, such as IT and hosting providers, marketing providers, communication services and printing providers, debt collection, tracing, debt recovery, fraud prevention, and credit reference agencies, and others. When we do so we take steps to ensure they meet our data security standards, so that your personal data remains secure.
4.3. Public or regulatory authorities
If required from time to time, we disclose personal data to public authorities, regulators or governmental bodies, including when required by law or regulation, under a code of practice or conduct, or when these authorities or bodies require us to do so.
4.4. Others
- If our business is sold to another organization or if it is re-organized, personal data will be shared so that you can continue to receive products and services. We will usually also share personal data with prospective purchasers when we consider selling or transferring part or all of a business. We take steps to ensure such potential purchasers keep the data secure.
- We may need to disclose personal data to exercise or protect legal rights, including ours and those of our employees or other stakeholders, or in response to requests from individuals or their representatives who seek to protect their legal rights or such rights of others.
- International transfers of personal data
The Recipients referred to in section 4 above may be located outside Switzerland. In those cases, except where the relevant country has been determined by the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner to provide an adequate level of protection, SFG requires such recipients to comply with appropriate measures designed to protect personal data contained within a binding legal agreement. If and to the extent required by applicable law, we implement the necessary legal, operational and technical measure and/or enter into an agreement with you before such transfers.
- How long do we store your data?
We will only retain personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purpose for which it was collected or to comply with legal, regulatory or internal policy requirements. To help us do this, we apply criteria to determine the appropriate periods for retaining your personal data depending on its purpose, such as proper account maintenance, facilitating client relationship management, and responding to legal claims or regulatory requests.
- Your rights
You have a right to ask SFG to rectify inaccurate personal data we collect and process and the right to request restriction of your personal data pending such a request being considered.
Where we process your personal data on the basis of your consent, you have the right to withdraw that consent at any time. Please also note that the withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal.
You have a right to ask us to stop processing your personal data, or to request deletion of your personal data – these rights are not absolute (as sometimes there may be overriding interests that require the processing to continue, for example), but we will consider your request and respond to you with the outcome. When personal data are processed for direct marketing purposes, your right to object extends to direct marketing, including profiling to the extent it is related to such marketing. You may object to direct marketing by emailing us at info@swissfoodgroup.ch at any time.
Where we process your personal data on the basis of your consent, or where such processing is necessary for entering into or performing our obligations under a contract with you, you may have the right under applicable data protection laws to request your personal data be transferred to you or to another controller. You have the right to ask SFG for a copy of some or all of the personal data we collect and process about you.
You can exercise the rights set out above by contacting the Data Protection Officer using the details in section 8 of this notice.
- Exercising your rights, and complaints
If you are not satisfied with any aspect of the processing of your personal data by SFG, we would like to discuss it with you to understand how we can rectify the issue. If you would like to speak to us about our use of your personal data, you can do this by contacting the data protection office contact by emailing info@swissfoodgroup.ch or via mail to Swiss Food Group, rue du Rhône 42, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland.
If you are not satisfied with SFG’s response, you have the right to make a complaint to the data protection authority in the jurisdiction where you live or work, or in the place where you think an issue in relation to your data has arisen.
- Security Note
We have in place appropriate technical and organizational measures to prevent unauthorized or unlawful access to the personal data you have provided to us. As complete data security cannot be guaranteed for communication via e-mails, instant messaging, and similar means of communication, we would recommend sending any particularly confidential information by an alternative secure means.
- Changes to personal data
We are committed to keeping your personal data accurate and up to date. Therefore, if your personal data changes, please inform us of the change as soon as possible.
- Other provisions that are specific to Switzerland
Example of retention periods (cf. section 6):
In general, SFG will retain personal data for the period of your relationship or contract with SFG plus 10 years, reflecting the length of time for which legal claims may be made following termination of such relationship or contract. An ongoing or anticipated legal or regulatory proceeding may lead to retention beyond this period.
Due to requirements laid down by the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (“FINMA”), SFG must furthermore store all electronic correspondence (e-mails and other communication, etc.). SFG must also make this information available to FINMA on demand.
SFG in Switzerland also stores all incoming and outgoing business and private communication data (in particular e-mails with attachments, chats, instant messaging) in a separate, protected electronic archive located in Switzerland for a period of 10 years.
- Status of this privacy notice
This privacy notice was updated in February 2020. It is a notice explaining what SFG does, rather than a document that binds SFG or any other party contractually. We reserve the right to amend it from time to time. If the notice has been updated, we will take steps to inform you of the update by appropriate means, depending on how we normally communicate with you, such as through your account statement.