What are cookies and what do they do?
Cookies are small text files placed on your device or in your browser memory when you visit a website. Cookies can recognise your device or browser when you return to a website or app.
Cookies help to make the interaction between users (or their devices) and websites faster and easier. For example, they can remember your preferences, login details or information you supply as you move through an application process. We need to collect some of this data for the website to operate. We also wish to improve your and other user’s experience by understanding how our websites and apps are used, provide personalised content and deliver messages to you, both service and marketing.
Why do we use cookies?
We use cookies for different purposes. Some are essential and do not require consent, others are optional and we will ask for your consent to use these cookies before we place them on your device or browser. We use cookies for the following purposes:
- Ensure we can protect you from fraud and secure your online activity;
- Continually improve the security around our websites and apps;
- Study how people use our websites and apps and our other services, so we can improve them;
- Personalise the products, services and offers you see to those which may be relevant for you;
- Tailor the marketing you see on social media, apps and other websites;
- Allow us to customise what you see on our website and where you see this based on what we know about you;
- Store login details and temporarily remember some of your information on applications;
- Evaluate the effectiveness of our advertising and marketing cookies;
- Use our own (first-party) and our partners (third-party) cookies to support these activities.
From time to time we may update and alter these purposes and the cookies we use. If there are any significant changes to how and why we use cookies, we will ask you to consent again before placing cookies for our new purposes.
What cookies do we use?
We use both our own (first-party) and our partner’s (third-party) cookies to support our activities. The types of cookies used by us are described below:
Essential cookies
We use some essential cookies which cannot be turned off to make the website work and stay secure. They do things like remembering your preferences, enabling our tools and calculators, managing your security and making sure you see the correct product information as you move around the site.
Analytics
We use analytics cookies to understand how our customers use our website, for example the pages customers visit and the links they click on. This helps us make improvements and understand what visitors to our site are interested in.
Functional
Functional cookies help us give you the best experience on our site. They include services that help manage site delivery and remember the information you give us as you move through your application. When you revisit a website, cookies also help the site to remember your preferences or registration details.
Advertising
Our advertising partners allow us to serve you relevant advertising across the web and help us measure the effectiveness of our campaigns. These partners may collect information about you such as your browser information, location and IP address.
Social media
We use social media providers to serve relevant adverts to you on your social networks. Providers like Facebook and others may use cookies to match your interests and make adverts more relevant on their site.
Performance
We use third party partners to monitor and measure the performance of our site. These cookies track performance related information like how long the site took to load.
How long do the cookies stay on my device?
Essential cookies and those you consent to will be held in your browser until they expire, either when you close your browser (session cookies) or at a future date (persistent cookies). You can also clear cookies at any time from your browser settings.
We will store your cookie consent choices for 12 months before we ask again or you can change your cookie consent at any time with the 'Cookie settings' option on the bottom right of your screen.
Changing your consent
If you change your mind about the types of cookies you consent to, you can update your preferences at any time by selecting 'Cookie settings' at the bottom right of your screen. If you wish to remove any cookies from your device that were set already, please use your browser settings.
Turning Cookies on or off in your browser
You have a number of options when it comes to receiving cookies. You can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only 'trusted' sites to send them, or to accept only those cookies from websites you are currently using.
We recommend that you don't block all cookies because parts of our website rely on them to work properly.
To find out how to turn cookies on and off in your browser, click on your browser's link below.
If you prefer not to receive cookies then you won't be able to use our online application process or our online service because both rely on cookies to function effectively.
In that case you're welcome to contact us by telephone to apply for a product or service your account.