Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. 

Like many organisations, we use cookies to do a variety of different jobs including navigating the site efficiently and generally improving your experience. We also use them to help ensure that the ads you see online are made more relevant to you and your individual interests.   

As well as cookies, we use pixel tags and JavaScript to undertake these tasks. You can control and delete the cookies which are downloaded to your device from within your browser settings.  Details on how to do this, as well as more information on cookies is available here, or please contact us directly for further information  

When you visit our website, we deploy these technologies for the reasons given above, as well as to detect and prevent fraud. We also collect information about how you use our site – for example information on the device you’ve used to find us, the way you use the site (the pages you visit and actions you complete on these pages) and the IP address your device connects from – amongst many other things. 

You may not be able to complete certain activities when opening a savings account online or within our customer portal if the relevant cookies are not enabled.

We use cookies to:

• Ensure your security and privacy when in secure areas of our site

• Store login details for secure areas – such as the customer savings portal

• Temporarily store input information in our calculators, tools and application forms.

• Provide you with advertising which is more relevant to you, improve our targeting and enhance your journey through our sites.

• Improve our understanding of how you navigate through our website so that we can keep making improvements to suit you

• Evaluate our sites' advertising and promotional effectiveness (we own the anonymous data collected and don't share it with anyone); and

• We use both our own (first-party) and partner companies' (third-party) cookies to support these activities.

There are 4 main types of cookies as identified by the International Chamber of Commerce guide to cookie categories: Strictly Necessary, Performance, Functionality & Profile and Targeting.  Descriptions of each type of cookie are given below but Cookiepedia also provides concise and user-friendly definitions of each type of cookie.

Strictly necessary Cookies:  Also known as essential cookies, these are necessary for a website to perform correctly and cannot generally be turned off.  

Performance Cookies:  Collect information about how visitors use a website, which pages they visit and actions they perform onsite.  This allows the website owner to improve the performance of the website and the user journey and provide a better experience for its visitors.

Functionality Cookies:  Allow a website to remember choices made by a user such as product selection or customisable parts of webpages

Targeting/Advertising Cookies:  Used by advertisers to show targeted adverts, limit the number of times an advert is seen by a particular user and measure their effectiveness.  

You can control the use of cookies within your browser settings.

Web browsers allow control of most cookies through the browser settings which can be found in the advanced settings area.