FinanceLocal Privacy Policy

This privacy policy applies to financelocal.com.au and the services FinanceLocal provides through it. It explains what information we collect, how we use and store it, who we share it with, how long we retain it, and the rights you have over it under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles.

FinanceLocal is operated by Q1 Group Pty Ltd, an Australian company. References to “we”, “us”, and “our” in this policy mean Q1 Group Pty Ltd trading as FinanceLocal.

1. Tenant policies are separate

FinanceLocal lists independent financial experts on the financelocal.com.au platform. Each FinanceLocal Expert operates their own canonical website (for example, modernhomeloans.com.au) under their own privacy policy and their own credentials. This policy applies only to financelocal.com.au. When you interact directly with a FinanceLocal Expert through their own website, their privacy policy governs that interaction.

2. Information we collect

The information we collect on financelocal.com.au falls into four buckets:

• Audit form submissions. When you run a free AI-readiness audit at /audit, we collect the information you enter into the form: broker name, business name, suburb + postcode, state, website URL, aggregator, email address (optional), and any optional demographic questions. We also derive a slug from the suburb + postcode for the resulting report URL.
• Audit-generation data. To generate the audit, we crawl pages of the website you submit (publicly accessible content only). The crawl results, the deterministic scoring outputs, and the final AI-generated report are stored against your submission record.
• Email engagement. When we send you an audit email through our email provider (Resend), we receive webhook events (delivered, opened, clicked, bounced, complained) and store them against your audit record. This tells us whether the email was received and engaged with; we do not read message content beyond what we sent.
• Cookies and authentication. If you sign in to a FinanceLocal admin surface, we set authentication cookies via our auth provider (Supabase). We do not run analytics cookies or third-party advertising cookies on financelocal.com.au.

3. How we use information

We use the information collected for these purposes only:

• Generating and delivering your audit report. Crawl outputs, scoring, and the LLM-generated report are produced against the website and details you submit.
• Communicating with you about the audit. Acknowledgement, ready, and crawl-failed emails are sent when relevant to your submission.
• Operating the platform. Telemetry events (form submissions, audit completions, email engagement, page views, claim-CTA clicks) are aggregated for internal monitoring of the audit funnel.
• Suburb-claim tracking.We track which suburbs are held by which FinanceLocal Experts so the platform’s “one expert per suburb” standard can be enforced.

We do not sell information to third parties. We do not share information with advertising networks. We do not use submitted information to train AI models that are not part of the audit pipeline.

4. Where information is stored, and who processes it

Information collected on financelocal.com.au is stored with our Australian-region service providers and processed only by the providers listed below:

• Supabase (database + auth) — Australian ap-southeast-2 region. Data at rest is stored in Sydney.
• Vercel(web platform + edge compute) — region routing prefers ap-southeast-2 (Sydney). Some edge caching may briefly hold data closer to a visitor’s location.
• OpenAI(audit-report generation) — your audit prompt content is sent to OpenAI’s Responses API to generate the report prose. Per OpenAI’s API terms, content sent to the API is not used to train their models. OpenAI processes data on US infrastructure.
• Resend (transactional email delivery) — email recipient address, subject, body, and engagement events are processed by Resend to deliver the email and relay engagement back to us.

Some of these providers process information outside Australia. We use them under their published data-processing terms and send only the information needed for the specific function.

5. How long we retain information

Audit submissions and reports are retained indefinitely while FinanceLocal operates the platform; you may request deletion (see “Your rights” below). Email engagement events are retained alongside the related audit record. Authentication sessions follow the lifetime of the session cookie and expire naturally.

6. Your rights

Under the Australian Privacy Principles, you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct personal information that is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, or misleading.
• Request deletion of personal information we hold (subject to any record-keeping obligations we have under Australian law).
• Withdraw consent for marketing communications, where applicable. Audit-related transactional emails (acknowledgement, ready, crawl-failed) are sent because you submitted an audit and are not subject to consent withdrawal — but you may request deletion of the underlying record, which will end further sends.
• Lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au) if you believe we have breached the Australian Privacy Principles.

7. Security

We use industry-standard practices to protect information, including encrypted connections, role-based access controls on our database, and least-privilege scopes for our service providers. No system is perfectly secure. If we ever become aware of a notifiable data breach affecting your information, we will notify you in accordance with our obligations under the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.

8. Children

FinanceLocal is intended for use by adult financial professionals and adult consumers seeking financial services. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 18.

9. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy as the platform evolves. Material changes will be reflected in the “Last updated” line above. Where the change affects how we use existing information, we will provide reasonable notice through the email address you supplied (if any).

10. Contact

For privacy enquiries, requests under the Australian Privacy Principles, or to exercise any of the rights described above:

Email: privacy@financelocal.com.au