Portafina

Opinion1 · 26 October 2018 at 9:09PM

Hi, I work for an Independent Financial Adviser and my husband received the Portafina letter 'Time to cut your losses with your current pension scheme?' this week. I find it disturbing that a financial adviser firm can send 'cold call' letters to an unknown individual and offer to tick a box to have full servicing rights without meeting that individual, explaining the fees and having a client agreement (contract) signed. By ticking this box and signing the form you are effectively sacking your existing adviser.
My offer of information to you is: please meet your new adviser before signing any paperwork of this nature. Thank you for reading.

Col_Jessop · 14 December 2018 at 6:20PM

If you are receiving named and addressed mail from this company then you should hit them with a Subject Access Request without delay. The supply chain of data brokers they buy / rent their data from is out of date and there is no evidence of permission to hold your data. They are operating purely on a legitimate interest basis. This signifies a complete loss of control of your personal data that could lead to all sorts of problems for you. Agree with all comments above regarding not dealing with cold call or direct mail companies offering financial advice. The evidence in the FT article pretty much nails it if anyone was ever in any doubt. The mailing practice is interesting. Another company supplied by the same data provider is Bluecrest Health Screening who attempt to charge people for health tests that you could request through your GP for free if you had an genuine concerns. Data brokers are selling your data without your permission under a loophole of legitimate interested. This allows companies like the above to target specific consumers who might not be aware of their rights. Best to shut down the supply of data at source to these companies. Making sure you have opted out of the electoral roll open register is a good start point as this is then sold out to data brokers who will profit from trading in your personal data. Also worth checking you personal data on 192.com as this is also a key source for data scraping data brokers. You might still find your data on 192.com even if you have opted out of the open register. Apparently an ex-Deputy Information Commissioner is an advisor to 192.com providing them with an uncomfortably close relationship with the ICO. In short, follow through on cold calls and direct mailing and you can shut down the companies selling / renting to data to companies like Portafina.

JoeEngland · 15 December 2018 at 8:11PM

Col_Jessop wrote: »

If you are receiving named and addressed mail from this company then you should hit them with a Subject Access Request without delay. The supply chain of data brokers they buy / rent their data from is out of date and there is no evidence of permission to hold your data. They are operating purely on a legitimate interest basis. This signifies a complete loss of control of your personal data that could lead to all sorts of problems for you. Agree with all comments above regarding not dealing with cold call or direct mail companies offering financial advice. The evidence in the FT article pretty much nails it if anyone was ever in any doubt. The mailing practice is interesting. Another company supplied by the same data provider is Bluecrest Health Screening who attempt to charge people for health tests that you could request through your GP for free if you had an genuine concerns. Data brokers are selling your data without your permission under a loophole of legitimate interested. This allows companies like the above to target specific consumers who might not be aware of their rights. Best to shut down the supply of data at source to these companies. Making sure you have opted out of the electoral roll open register is a good start point as this is then sold out to data brokers who will profit from trading in your personal data. Also worth checking you personal data on 192.com as this is also a key source for data scraping data brokers. You might still find your data on 192.com even if you have opted out of the open register. Apparently an ex-Deputy Information Commissioner is an advisor to 192.com providing them with an uncomfortably close relationship with the ICO. In short, follow through on cold calls and direct mailing and you can shut down the companies selling / renting to data to companies like Portafina.

From what I know of GDPR, Portafina couldn't claim legitimate interest if they've merely bought a mailing list.

Silvertabby · 15 December 2018 at 9:46PM

Portafina have categorically stated that they do not cold call. As unsolicited mailshots are just cold calls in paper form, then it's reasonable to assume that these letters won't be from Portafina.

Just shred them with the rest of the {Edited by Forum Team} mail.

Col_Jessop · 19 December 2018 at 10:47AM

Portafina do direct mailing. If you receive direct mail from them request immediately that they tell you where they got your personal data from. It looks like there main personal data supplier is Read Group in one of its many guises. In the supply chain I have investigated, Read Group in turn buy / rent their data from Omnis Data Ltd; who in turn buy / rent their data from The Original Data Company. The Original Dta Company claim they got their data from a company no longer trading; however the owner of that company is self-identified on linkedin as being the Operations Director at Original Data Company.
None of the companies in the supply chain are claiming to have consent to process the personal data and are solely relying on "legitimate interests". This involves a balance of risk vs benefit. Personally I see zero benefit to the public by being contacted by Portafina. I can see significant risk of identity theft / personal data misuse by a lengthy supply chain of data brokers buying / selling / renting personal data purely for commercial gain without any attempt to gain permission to trade in our personal data or more importantly validate our personal data. Made all the more worrying when you consider that many of the data brokers trading in this way are members of the DMA and DPNetwork and worse actually sell and rent data into the Credit Reference Agencies.

This is an area where I actually feel sorry for the more reputable players in the finance sector. They are spending fortunes to comply with GDPR and rightly so. However, data brokers are freely buying and selling our data and are actually receiving significant levels of support and guidance from the ICO to maintain their buying and selling of our personal data without even attempting to gain our consent.

Portafina

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