Legitimate interests

We can only rely on legitimate interests where your rights don't override our interest. This means we typically use it in ways you'd expect. These are low risk and won't have a big impact on you.

Before we can rely on legitimate interests, we need to make sure we balance our need to process the data against your interests, rights and freedoms. We do this by completing a Legitimate Interest Assessment.

The Legitimate interest Assessment tests:

• Purpose: why are using legitimate interest?
• Necessity: is the processing necessary to achieve the purpose? For it to be necessary the processing needs to be targeted and proportionate.
• Balance: do the individuals rights override the legitimate interest?

Legitimate interest can apply in many scenarios but we can’t rely on legitimate interest if there is another reasonable and less intrusive way to achieve the same result.

When it comes to legitimate interests, you have two specific rights available to you:

• Right to object: This means you can ask us to stop processing your personal information at any time (if we rely on legitimate interests to do this). We may not do this if we have a strong enough reason to process your information which outweighs your objection.
• Right to be informed: This means you have the right to know how we use your information (this includes where we rely on legitimate interest). Our Privacy Notice and this page provides details of when we use this.

You can submit a request for the right to object by using our online form, writing to us, calling us, popping into branch or emailing Data.Protection@thecoventry.co.uk.

We need to respond to your request within one month of receiving it. Learn more about your data rights or read our Privacy Notice. 

We rely on legitimate interest to process your information:

• To confirm who are you and do checks to prevent fraud and money laundering. We do this before and during your relationship with us. Protecting you from financial crime is incredibly important to us. We make sure we're identifying risks and monitoring threats as expected by law and regulation.
• To perform credit modelling and risk management. Some of this information is needed for regulatory reasons. We might also use it to make decisions about our products and services.
• To trace you for debt recovery purposes. This will be where you've defaulted on a mortgage.
• To check and improve our customer service. We may also use your information to provide training for our employees.
• To record CCTV footage in our branches and our offices. We want to make sure our members, customers and employees feel safe and secure. That’s why we actively record and monitor our premises.
• For testing purposes. We may use your information to test our computer systems to make sure they're secure and function properly. We may also use your data for testing to help improve our products, services, tools or introduce new ways of working. This might include training Al systems, but we'll always minimise the use of data and only use identifiable data where absolutely necessary. Using your information for testing helps us maintain and improve the confidentiality, integrity, availability and performance of our systems and helps improve your experience with us.
• To conduct customer research to help us improve our products and service. This research also helps us to understand our members and customers better.
• For promotional or marketing purposes. This might include where this supports our community and charity partners or events.

Wherever we use your personal information for our legitimate interest, we'll always make sure it’s used in a way that is fair, lawful, safe and secure.