Paying your rent by Direct Debit - what you need to know

Your letting agent or property manager collects your rent by Direct Debit using technology provided by Wectory Ltd. This short notice explains how it works and how your information is used. It does not change your tenancy.

Who you are dealing with

You pay your rent to your letting agent or property manager, as you do now. They are the organisation you deal with, and the Direct Debit is set up under their name and brand. Wectory provides the technology behind the scenes and never holds, routes or receives your rent.

Setting up the Direct Debit

You set up the Direct Debit by entering your bank details on a secure page provided by GoCardless, the regulated Direct Debit provider (authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority, FRN 597190). Your full bank details are entered only on that page - your agent and Wectory never see or store your full account number.

Your Direct Debit is covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee, which GoCardless shows you when you set it up. Among other things, it means you are entitled to a full and immediate refund from your bank of any payment taken in error. You will also be told in advance of the amount and date of each collection.

What you pay

You pay your normal rent. There is no Wectory fee and no extra charge added to your rent for paying this way.

Your information

Your agent decides how most of your personal data is used and is the "controller" of it - their privacy notice applies, and any questions about your data are best directed to them first. Wectory processes your data to run the rent collection on your agent's behalf, as its service provider. GoCardless processes your payment data as a separate controller to provide the Direct Debit; its privacy notice at https://gocardless.com/legal/privacy/ explains how, and you can ask GoCardless to give you a copy of that data, correct or erase it, restrict its use, or object to its use.

The information used to collect your rent includes your name, contact details, address, your tenancy details, and the payment records returned by GoCardless (which include the last two digits of your bank account number, never the full number).

Wectory also keeps a coded record of how your Direct Debit payments turn out, without your name, email or phone number (where your rent is advanced, the property's address is kept only to spot the same rent being assigned twice), and uses it as a controller in its own right to inform the risk checks letting agents run on its platform. Other agents see only three things: an overall indicator inside their own risk check, which never shows your name, contact details or who your agent is; figures aggregated across five or more agents; and, where the same rent is already assigned on the platform for an overlapping period, that fact alone, never who holds it, its terms or its dates. A person at the agency decides every deal, and no agent may use any of this to decide whether to let to you, renew your tenancy or let it continue. Section 6A of Wectory's Privacy Policy explains this use, which Wectory calls Platform Insights. Questions and complaints about this use go to Wectory directly at in@wectory.com.

You can object to this use at any time by emailing in@wectory.com.

If you have a question about your data that your agent cannot resolve, you can contact Wectory at in@wectory.com. You also have the right to complain to us directly and to the Information Commission (ICO), the UK data protection regulator (ico.org.uk).