The Payments Expert

Legal

Privacy notice

Last updated: 12 May 2026.

This notice explains how The Payments Expert Ltd (“we”, “us”) collects, uses and protects your personal data when you use this website. We act as the data controller for personal data described below.

Who we are

  • The Payments Expert Ltd, company number 15289264, registered in England & Wales.
  • Registered office: 2 Claridge Court, Lower Kings Road, Berkhamsted, England, HP4 2AF.
  • Contact: hello@thepaymentsexpert.com · UK +44 1442 899 544.

What we collect

  1. Information you give us — name, business name, email, phone, monthly card turnover and any free-text message you submit through our contact form, application form or chat assistant.
  2. Statements and supporting documents you choose to send for a quote (e.g. a recent merchant statement uploaded to the chat assistant or emailed in).
  3. Technical data — IP address, user-agent and request metadata recorded by Google Cloud (our hosting provider) for security and abuse-prevention.
  4. Preferences — your cookie consent choice, stored locally on your device.

Why we use it (legal bases)

  • Legitimate interest — replying to your enquiry, preparing a like-for-like quote, and contacting you about it.
  • Performance of a contract — onboarding you onto a merchant account if you decide to switch.
  • Consent — loading the optional chat assistant and storing related conversation history in your browser.
  • Legal obligation — anti-money-laundering checks where required, retention of accounting records.

Who we share it with

  • Acquirers and gateways we quote you against, only when you ask us to obtain a quote.
  • Slack — enquiry summaries land in our internal #website-enquiries channel via webhook.
  • Google Cloud — hosts this site (Cloud Storage) and the chat assistant (Cloud Run, Vertex AI Gemini) within the European Union.

We do not sell your personal data and do not use it for advertising.

International transfers

Our infrastructure runs in europe-west1 (Belgium). Some sub-processors (e.g. Google for support, Slack for messaging) may process data outside the UK/EEA. Where they do, transfers rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or an adequacy decision.

How long we keep it

  • Enquiries we don’t convert: up to 24 months, then deleted.
  • Active client records: for the duration of your contract plus six years to meet HMRC and AML retention rules.
  • Merchant statements you send us (whether by email or uploaded to the chat assistant): kept only long enough to verify the saving and prepare your quote, then deleted automatically within 72 hours. We enforce this with a lifecycle rule on the storage bucket.
  • Chat conversation history: stored only in your browser by default; cleared when you clear site data.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you can ask us to:

  • access the personal data we hold about you;
  • correct it if it’s inaccurate;
  • delete it (subject to retention rules above);
  • restrict or object to certain processing;
  • port it to another provider in a portable format;
  • withdraw consent — for example by changing your cookie choice.

Email hello@thepaymentsexpert.com and we’ll respond within one calendar month.

Complaints

You can complain to the UK regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk), 0303 123 1113. We’d appreciate the chance to put things right first.

Changes

We may update this notice as our processing changes. The date at the top tells you when it was last revised.

See also our cookie policy and terms of use.