Privacy Policy

About this policy

Stargaze Pty Ltd (ABN 86 664 377 191), trading as Stargaze Commercial Finance (we, us, our), is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, hold, use and disclose personal information, and how we comply with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (Privacy Act) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs). It applies to our website and to the services we provide, including to applicants for commercial finance and proposed guarantors. If you apply for finance through us, you will also be asked to sign our Privacy & Credit Consent, which sets out the specific consents that apply to your application, including your consent to credit checks and to certain overseas disclosures. If there is any inconsistency between this policy and a Privacy & Credit Consent you have signed, the Privacy & Credit Consent applies to your application.

What is personal information

Personal information is information or an opinion about an identified individual, or an individual who is reasonably identifiable. Credit information is personal information about your credit history, creditworthiness and credit capacity that is used to assess finance. Sensitive information (such as health information or information about criminal history) is a special category of personal information. We only collect sensitive information where it relates directly to arranging, providing or managing your finance and, where required, with your consent, and we handle it in accordance with the Privacy Act.

The personal information we collect

Depending on your dealings with us, the personal information we collect may include:

• your name, contact details and date of birth
• identity-verification documents
• details about your business, its directors, owners and guarantors
• financial information, including bank statements, accounting information, income, expenses, assets and liabilities
• credit information (see “Credit information” below)
• and, when you use our website, technical information such as your IP address, browser type and pages visited

How we collect your information

We collect personal information directly from you wherever practicable — for example, when you make an enquiry, complete an application, or correspond with us. We also collect information from:

• people connected with your application, such as your accountant, bookkeeper, solicitor or other adviser, your employer, your landlord or managing agent, your referees, and any co-borrower or guarantor
• any person or business that referred you to us
• any conveyancer, solicitor or settlement agent involved in a secured loan
• public registers, including the Australian Business Register, ASIC and the Personal Property Securities Register
• credit reporting bodies (CRBs)
• identity-verification services
• a bank-statement service that, with your authority, retrieves your bank transaction data electronically
• and our website, through cookies and analytics

We contact people connected with your application only to verify the information provided, assess your application or manage your finance.

Some laws, including the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 (Cth), require or authorise us, or the lenders we deal with, to collect certain personal information, including to verify your identity.

Information about other people

If you give us personal information about another person — for example, a co-applicant, director, guarantor, accountant or referee — please let them know that you have done so, that we will handle their information as described in this policy and in our Privacy & Credit Consent, and that they can contact our Privacy Officer to access it or to ask for a copy of this policy. If you cannot provide their information, we may be unable to assist you.

Cookies and our website

Our website uses cookies and similar technologies to help it function, to remember your preferences, and to understand how the site is used so we can improve it. You can set your browser to refuse cookies or to alert you when cookies are being used, although some parts of the site may not work properly if you do.

Why we collect, hold, use and disclose your information

We collect, hold, use and disclose personal information to:

• respond to your enquiries
• assess your application and your creditworthiness, and assess you as a guarantor
• arrange, submit and manage commercial finance, including submitting your application to one or more lenders and to prospective private investors who may fund it
• verify your identity
• manage our relationship with you, including handling enquiries and complaints
• prevent and investigate fraud
• run, administer, improve and grow our business, including in connection with any proposed sale of, or investment in, our business
• comply with our legal obligations
• and, on the basis set out under “Direct marketing” below, keep you informed about products and services

If you do not provide the information we ask for, we may be unable to assess your application or provide our services, and a lender may be unable to assess or process your application.

We hold your personal information in our systems — including Salesforce, Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive — to manage our relationship with you and to provide our services efficiently. Where we share documents with lenders, applicants or other third parties using Google Drive or, in limited cases, controlled sharing through OneDrive, that sharing is a disclosure to the recipient (not to Google LLC or Microsoft Corporation), made for the purpose of arranging and managing your finance.

How we use technology, cloud services and AI

We use cloud-based systems and third-party technology to run our business. This includes Salesforce as our customer relationship management platform; Microsoft OneDrive, used primarily for internal document storage and internal access, with controlled external sharing where required; and Google Drive, used for document storage and, where appropriate, sharing documents with clients, lenders and other third parties. Each of these platforms is operated by a US-based provider and is used under a business-tier subscription: Salesforce under a data processing agreement with Salesforce, Inc.; Microsoft 365 business, with Microsoft’s standard data processing terms; and Google Workspace, with Google’s Cloud Data Processing Addendum. Each of these agreements restricts the provider to processing personal information only on our instructions and prohibits it from using that information for its own purposes. We also use AI-assisted tools that help us draft documents and carry out administrative tasks. We take care not to enter personal information — particularly sensitive information — into publicly available AI tools, and any AI we use is facilitative and administrative only.

Automated decision-making

We do not use computer programs — including AI — to make, or to substantially and directly support the making of, decisions that could reasonably be expected to significantly affect your rights or interests. Decisions about finance involve human judgement. If this changes, we will update this policy to reflect the automated decision-making transparency requirements that apply under the Privacy Act.

Who we disclose your information to

We may disclose your personal information to:

• lenders and prospective investors considering funding your finance, including the lenders on our current lender panel (a list is available on request)
• other lenders and finance providers
• our service providers, agents, contractors and related entities, including our administrative and back-office support providers in the Philippines
• accountants, lawyers, valuers and other advisers
• conveyancers, solicitors and settlement agents involved in a secured loan
• organisations that identify, investigate or prevent fraud or other misconduct
• people connected with your application whom we contact to verify information
• identity-verification providers
• parties involved in funding, securitising or acquiring an interest in a loan
• credit reporting bodies (see “Credit information” below)
• regulators, courts, tribunals, ombudsman and external dispute resolution schemes
• and any person we are required or authorised by law to disclose to

We may also disclose the status and outcome of your application to any person or business that referred you to us, and, on a confidential basis, disclose personal information to anyone who acquires, or is considering acquiring or investing in, an interest in our business or assets, and to their advisers. Each lender may only use the information it collects for the purposes described in our Privacy & Credit Consent, or in a separate consent you give that lender. We do not sell your personal information.

Overseas disclosure and handling

Some of the people and systems that handle personal information on our behalf are located overseas or store information overseas. In particular, we engage service providers in the Philippines for administrative and back-office support, and we use the following cloud platforms, which operate on infrastructure located outside Australia, including in the United States: Salesforce, Inc. (customer relationship management); Microsoft Corporation (OneDrive, for document storage and sharing); and Google LLC (Google Drive, for document storage and sharing). We also use other technology providers in the United States and elsewhere for software and AI-assisted tools.

Your personal information may therefore be accessed or stored outside Australia, including in the Philippines, the United States, and other countries in which our service providers operate.

Because each of the cloud platforms listed above is used under a business-tier subscription with a data processing agreement that restricts the provider to processing personal information only on our instructions, and prohibits it from using that information for its own purposes, we treat our use of these platforms as a use, not a disclosure, of personal information under the APPs. Our obligation to keep that information secure continues to apply, and we take reasonable steps to ensure these providers maintain security standards consistent with the APPs.

Our service providers in the Philippines receive personal information as a disclosure, for the purpose of providing administrative and back-office support to us. Neither the Philippines nor the United States has a privacy law that the Australian Government has recognised as substantially similar to, or providing the same protections as, the APPs. For that reason, when you apply for finance through us, our Privacy & Credit Consent asks you to consent specifically, for the purposes of APP 8.2(b), to us disclosing your personal and credit information to our service providers in the Philippines and, to the extent any handling of your information by Salesforce, Inc., Microsoft Corporation or Google LLC is found to go beyond processing on our behalf and to instead constitute a disclosure to them, to those providers. Where you give that consent, APP 8.1 will not apply to those disclosures. This means that we will not be accountable under the Privacy Act for how those overseas recipients handle your information, and you may not be able to seek redress under the Privacy Act, or through the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, in relation to their handling of it.

Where we disclose personal information to any other overseas recipient (for example, where an overseas lender or third party is given access to documents via Google Drive or OneDrive), we take reasonable steps to ensure that recipient handles it consistently with the APPs. Overseas recipients may be subject to different laws, and you may not be able to seek redress under the Privacy Act against an overseas recipient.

Credit information

Although the finance we arrange is commercial, it is applied for or guaranteed by individuals, so we collect and handle both consumer and commercial credit information about applicants, directors, owners and guarantors. With your consent, we and the lenders we deal with may obtain a credit report about you from a CRB to assess your application, to decide whether to accept you as a guarantor and assess the risk that you may be unable to meet your obligations under a guarantee, and to manage any finance provided.

The CRBs we deal with are Equifax (www.equifax.com.au), illion (www.illion.com.au) and Experian (www.experian.com.au). Each CRB’s credit reporting policy, which explains how it manages your credit information, is available on its website. A CRB may include credit information we or a lender disclose about you in reports it provides to other credit providers, to help them assess your creditworthiness. If you fail to meet your payment obligations in relation to credit, or you commit a serious credit infringement, we or a lender may disclose that to a CRB.

You can ask a CRB not to use your credit information for direct-marketing “pre-screening” by contacting that CRB. If you believe on reasonable grounds that you have been, or are likely to be, a victim of fraud (including identity fraud), you can ask a CRB to place a ban on your credit information, and during the ban period the CRB must not use or disclose it without your consent. You can access the credit information we hold about you, and ask for it to be corrected if it is wrong, by contacting our Privacy Officer or the relevant CRB.

Identity verification

We and the lenders we deal with may verify your identity electronically, including by disclosing your details to a verification service or to a CRB to confirm whether they match records held, and receiving an assessment of that match. If your identity cannot be verified this way, we will tell you and give you an opportunity to correct your information. Alternative verification methods are available on request.

Direct marketing

We may use your contact details to send you information about our services and offers that may be relevant to you, including by email, SMS and telephone. You can opt out at any time — by using the unsubscribe function in any message, or by contacting our Privacy Officer using the details below — and we will action your request.

How we store and protect your information

We hold your personal information in our customer systems: Salesforce, our cloud-based customer relationship management platform (operated by Salesforce, Inc., on infrastructure that includes the United States); Microsoft OneDrive, used primarily for internal document storage and internal access, with controlled external sharing where required; Google Drive, used for document storage and, where appropriate, sharing documents with clients, lenders and other third parties; and other cloud-based software and services used to run our business. Your information may also be accessed on devices used by our staff, but only transiently and for the purpose of performing their duties, and we restrict the retention of personal information on local devices beyond that transient operational use.

We take reasonable technical and organisational steps to protect personal information in each of these environments from misuse, interference, loss, and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. These steps include access controls and multi-factor authentication for our systems, encryption of data both in transit and at rest, and the restriction on local device storage described above.

We keep your information for as long as we need it for the purposes described in this policy and to meet our legal and record-keeping obligations, which we currently expect will be a period of seven years from the end of your relationship with us for client and transaction records. We periodically review, and delete or de-identify, personal information held in Salesforce, OneDrive and Google Drive once the applicable retention period has expired and the information is no longer required for legal, regulatory or business purposes. When we no longer need information, we take reasonable steps to destroy or de-identify it, including by exercising our contractual rights to delete data held on third-party platforms.

Keeping your information accurate

We take reasonable steps to make sure the personal information we collect, use and disclose is accurate, up to date and complete. Please tell us if your details change, or if you think any information we hold about you is wrong.

Access and correction

You may ask to access, or to correct, the personal information (including credit information) we hold about you by contacting our Privacy Officer using the details below. We will respond within a reasonable time. Access and correction are subject to some exceptions permitted by law; if we refuse, we will give you reasons in writing and tell you how to complain. To access or correct information a lender holds about you, please contact that lender.

Complaints

If you have a privacy complaint, including a complaint about how your credit information has been handled, please contact our Privacy Officer using the details below. We will acknowledge your complaint and respond within a reasonable time. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at www.oaic.gov.au or on 1300 363 992.

Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or the law. The current version is available on our website, and we will note the date it was last updated.

Contact us — Privacy Officer

Stargaze Pty Ltd (ABN 86 664 377 191) trading as Stargaze Commercial Finance. Attention: Swapnil Valiyapurayil, Privacy Officer.
Phone: +61 410 938 585
Email: swapnil@stargazefinance.com
Post: 315 Prospect Road, Blair Athol SA 5084