Privacy Policy

Information you give us during the application

Our application is a multi-step form. We save each answer as soon as you advance to the next step — before you create an account, and whether or not you ever finish. If you abandon the application partway through, we keep what you entered.

• About you: name, email address, phone number, job title, home address, and whether you are a controlling manager of the business.
• Your Social Security number. We collect your full SSN to verify your identity and to request credit information. It is encrypted before storage and held in a separate restricted table that ordinary application access cannot read. Only the last four digits appear anywhere in the normal interface.
• About your business: legal name, DBA, EIN, industry, entity type, time in business, physical and mailing address, and website.
• Funding request: amount requested, use of funds, urgency, and your self-reported credit range and revenue.
• Documents you upload: business bank statements and any other supporting files.

Information we collect automatically

• IP address and browser user-agent. We record these at the moment you give consent, as proof of that consent, and alongside your application answers.
• Referral and campaign data: the page that referred you and any UTM campaign parameters in the link you arrived through.
• A session identifier stored in your browser that links your answers together across steps before you have an account.

We do not use advertising pixels, third-party analytics, or cross-site tracking cookies. The only cookies we set are the ones required to keep you signed in and to secure the signing flow.

Information we obtain from others

• Bank account information from Plaid.When you link your bank, Plaid confirms the account is real and returns your account and routing numbers, institution name, and account name, which we store to prepare funding documents. Plaid’s own handling of your credentials is governed by Plaid’s End User Privacy Policy. We never see or store your online banking username or password.
• Identity verification resultsfrom Plaid’s identity verification service.
• Credit information. With your written authorization, we may obtain information from your personal credit profile from consumer reporting agencies. See Section 3.
• Financial metrics derived from your bank statements, including gross and monthly revenue, average daily balance, cash flow, NSF counts, negative-balance days, collections activity, and existing funding positions. Statements you upload are processed by our own statement-analysis service, which reads them and returns these figures.

• To run your application and present your deal to funding partners.
• To verify your identity, your business, and your bank account.
• To assess your funding request and prepare contracts and disclosures.
• To communicate with you about your application by email, phone, and text.
• To market our services to you, including following up if you start an application and do not finish it.
• To detect fraud, enforce our terms, and meet legal and recordkeeping obligations.

We do not use artificial intelligence or automated decision-making to evaluate your application. Funding decisions are made by the funding partners themselves.

When you check the authorization box in the application, you provide ‘written instructions’ under the Fair Credit Reporting Act authorizing us to obtain information from your personal credit profile from credit bureaus, solely to conduct a pre-qualification for credit.

Checking your funding options through Funding Network does not affect your credit score. The inquiry we make for pre-qualification is a soft inquiry. Soft inquiries are visible only to you and never lower your score.

The funding partners we route your deal to also use soft inquiries at the marketplace stage. No hard inquiry is ever made as part of shopping your deal.

We do not send your application to any funding partner that requires a hard inquiry. If that ever changes, we will update this policy and obtain your separate, explicit permission before your information is sent to such a partner.

Funding partners

This is the central disclosure of this policy. When your application enters the marketplace, we share it with funding partners so they can compete to fund you. They receive it identified, not anonymized — including your business legal name, industry, entity type, address, requested amount, and the financial metrics derived from your bank statements. Partners routed to your deal can export these metrics. The partner who wins your deal additionally receives your bank account details in order to fund you.

Funding partners are independent companies. Once they receive your information, their own privacy policies govern how they use and keep it. We do not control that, and their retention of your information is not something we can undo on your behalf. We are typically compensated by the funding partner when a deal is funded.

Service providers

We use these companies to operate the platform. Each receives only what its function requires:

Other disclosures

We may disclose information when required by law, subpoena, or regulator; to investigate fraud or enforce our agreements; and to an acquirer if our business is sold or merged.

We do not sell your information to data brokers, list sellers, or advertisers, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.Note that our sharing with funding partners, for which we are compensated, may be treated as a “sale” or “sharing” under some state privacy laws even though it is what you asked us to do. You can direct us to stop it at any time using the contact details below, though doing so ends our ability to find you funding.

• All data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
• Your full Social Security number is separately encrypted by our application before it is written, and stored in a restricted table with no ordinary read access.
• Bank account and routing numbers are held in a restricted table and released only to the funding partner who wins your deal.
• Uploaded documents are stored in private, non-public storage. Access is enforced per-record so you can reach only your own files.
• We never ask for, store, or auto-fill your online banking credentials.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

We keep your application information for as long as your account is active and afterward as needed for our legitimate business purposes, to resolve disputes, and to meet legal and recordkeeping obligations. Records tied to credit authorizations, contracts, and funded deals are retained for the periods required by applicable financial regulations.

Incomplete applications are also retained and may be used to follow up with you. You may ask us to delete an incomplete application at any time using the contact details below.

• Access, correction, and deletion. You may request a copy of the information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Contact us using the details below. We may need to keep certain records where the law requires it, and we cannot delete information already delivered to a funding partner.
• Communications. You may opt out of marketing email using the unsubscribe link, and out of text messages by replying STOP. We will still send messages necessary to service an active application. Consent to marketing communications is not a condition of using the service.
• Credit authorization. You may decline the credit authorization, but we cannot present your deal to funding partners without it.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights, including to opt out of “sale” or “sharing” and to be free from discrimination for exercising your rights. We honor these requests regardless of your state of residence.

Funding Network is a service for businesses and is not directed to anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

We may update this policy. If we make material changes to how we handle your information, we will notify you and update the effective date above.

To exercise any right described here, or with questions about this policy:

Funding Network Markets Inc.
legal@fundingnetwork.io
366 New York Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11213