Legal

Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy.

What we collect, why we collect it, who we give it to, and how to tell us to stop. Written to be read, not to be survived.

Version tmf-privacy-2026-08 Last updated 20 August 2026 Effective 20 August 2026

One detail is still to be completed by TMF Team — the business mailing address, marked TO BE COMPLETED in section 15. Everything else is final. TMF Team is a trading name; where it is not a registered company, this policy is given by the individual operating that business.

The short version

We collect what you type into our calculators, forms, chat and application, plus ordinary technical information about your visit.
We share it widely, on purpose. Brokering funding means presenting your file to funders, lenders and other partners in the commercial finance industry. We may be paid for referrals and for leads.
Social Security numbers, dates of birth and signatures are encrypted the moment they reach us with a key our server does not hold, and are never emailed or written down in plain text.
You can opt out of marketing, opt out of the sale and sharing of your information, change your cookie choices, and ask for a copy of your data or its deletion. How to do each is here.
We honour Global Privacy Control signals automatically.

1. Who this applies to

This policy covers tmfus.com and everything TMF Team does with information collected through it — the calculators, the chat, the contact form, the funding application, and email or telephone contact that follows from any of them. It applies to business owners, applicants, guarantors, and anybody whose details are submitted to us by somebody else.

It does not cover what a funder, lender or other partner does with your information after we pass it on. Once your file reaches them, their own privacy policy governs. We will tell you who has it if you ask.

2. What we collect

Category	Examples	Where from
Identifiers	Name, business name, DBA, email address, telephone number, business and home postal address, IP address, a reference number we assign	You
Sensitive personal information	Social Security number, date of birth, and your handwritten electronic signature — collected only in the funding application, and only because funders require them to underwrite and to verify identity	You
Financial information	Monthly revenue, time in business, existing advances and balances, EIN, ownership percentages, amount requested, business bank statements, home value, mortgage balance, monthly income and debt payments	You
Credit information	Credit score band you select, and consumer and business credit reports obtained with your authorization	You and credit bureaus
Commercial information	Industry, products you looked at, calculators you ran, estimates produced, applications started or submitted	You and this website
Internet activity	Pages viewed, referring website, campaign tags such as utm_source and gclid, browser and device type, approximate location from IP address, dates and times	This website and cookies
Communications	Chat transcripts, form messages, emails, and call recordings where a call is recorded	You
Inferences	Which funding products you appear to fit, and an indicative amount	Derived by us

Please do not type a Social Security number, a date of birth or a bank login into the chat window. The chat is for questions. Sensitive details belong in the application, which is built to protect them. Our chat system strips anything that looks like a Social Security number before it is stored, but do not rely on that.

3. Where it comes from

From you — forms, calculators, chat, the application, uploaded documents, email and telephone calls.
Automatically — from your browser and from cookies, as described in section 6.
From other people — a co-owner, partner or accountant may give us your details in connection with an application. If they do, we rely on their confirmation that you agreed.
From third parties — credit bureaus, identity and bank verification services, business data providers, funders reporting the status of your file, and marketing partners or lead sources that refer you to us.

4. How we use it

To produce the estimate you asked for and to match you to funding products.
To take, complete and place a funding application, and to manage it through to funding.
To verify who you are, to assess creditworthiness, and to meet know-your-customer, anti-money-laundering, anti-fraud and other legal obligations.
To contact you about your enquiry or application by phone, text and email.
To market funding and related business products and services to you, including through advertising on other websites and platforms.
To keep a record of the consents and authorizations you gave, and of the exact wording you agreed to.
To run, secure, measure and improve the website and our service.
To resolve disputes, enforce our terms, and comply with the law.

We use your Social Security number, date of birth and signature to underwrite, verify your identity, document the agreement, and place, syndicate, sell, service or collect the transaction — and we share them with the parties in section 5 for those purposes. We do not use them to target advertising at you.

Sharing is how brokering works. To get you an offer we have to show your file to people who write offers. When you use this site and when you submit an application, you authorize us to disclose, transfer, sell, license and otherwise share your information with:

Funders and lenders — funding companies, banks, credit unions, factoring companies and equipment lessors, so they can underwrite you and make an offer.
The wider commercial finance industry — other brokers, independent sales organizations, syndicators, participants, buyers of receivables, servicers, collection agents and referral partners, so your file can reach funders we do not deal with directly, so a transaction can be syndicated, sold, serviced or collected, and so you can be offered products we do not broker ourselves.
Marketing, advertising and lead partners — so that funding and related business products can be marketed to you, including through advertising platforms that match your details to your account with them.
Service providers — hosting, storage, email, telephony, live chat, e-signature, analytics, document processing and support, each acting on our instructions.
Credit bureaus and verification services — to obtain reports and to verify identity, bank accounts and businesses.
Our affiliates and related companies.
Professional advisers, insurers, auditors, regulators, courts and law enforcement — where we are required to, or where we need to establish or defend a legal claim.
A buyer or investor — if TMF Team is merged, acquired, financed or sold, your information is part of what transfers.

We may be paid for this. We receive commissions from funders when a transaction funds, and we may receive fees or other consideration for a referral or for a lead. Under California law, disclosing personal information for consideration is a “sale”, and disclosing it for cross-context behavioural advertising is “sharing”. We do both, and we say so plainly here rather than hiding it. You can stop it — see Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information.

What we share includes sensitive personal information. Your Social Security number, your date of birth and your electronic signature are part of the file that goes to funders, lenders, other brokers, syndicators, buyers, servicers and verification services, so that your application can be underwritten, funded, syndicated, sold, serviced or collected, and so that your identity can be verified. We may be paid in connection with those disclosures. You authorize this when you sign the application, and you can withdraw the authorization — see section 7.

What we do not do with it. We do not include your Social Security number, date of birth or signature in an advertising audience, and we do not supply them to an advertising platform, a general data broker, or anyone with no role in a funding transaction. Those three fields travel only to parties actually working on a transaction, and they stay encrypted on our side the whole time they sit with us — see section 12.

A current list of the partners we are actively sharing with is available on request from privacy@tmfus.com.

6. Cookies and similar technologies

A cookie is a small file this site asks your browser to keep. We also use localStorage and sessionStorage, which work the same way for this purpose. This section is our cookie policy.

Nothing but the necessary category runs until you agree to it. The first time you visit, a banner asks. You can change the answer at any time — open your cookie settings — and the choice is remembered for twelve months.

Name	Category	What it does	How long
`tmf_consent`	Necessary	Remembers the cookie choice you made, so we do not ask again and do not load anything you refused	12 months
`tmf_chat_session`	Necessary	Session storage. Keeps your place in a live chat so a reply is not lost when you change page	Until the tab closes
`tmf_visitor_v1`	Necessary	Local storage. Keeps the answers you typed into a calculator on your own device, so the application can pre-fill them and you do not type your name twice. Never contains a Social Security number, a date of birth or a signature, and is not sent anywhere by itself	Until you clear your browser data
`tmf_attr`	Analytics	Records the campaign, advertisement or website that first brought you here, so we know what works. Campaign tags only — no name, email or phone number	13 months
`tmf_last_touch`	Necessary	Session storage. The campaign tags on the visit you are making now, so they can be attached to a form you choose to submit	Until the tab closes
`_ga`, `_ga_*`	Analytics	Google Analytics, if enabled. Counts visits and tells us which pages get read. Loaded only after you accept analytics	Up to 24 months
`_fbp`, `fr`	Advertising	Meta pixel, if enabled. Lets us show our own advertising to people who have visited, and measure whether it worked. Loaded only after you accept advertising	Up to 3 months

Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends a GPC signal we treat it as an instruction not to sell or share your personal information. Analytics and advertising are switched off automatically and you are not shown the banner at all. You can still turn them on by hand in your cookie settings if you want to.

Your browser can help too. Every major browser lets you block or delete cookies in its settings. Blocking necessary cookies will break parts of this site, including the chat and the cookie banner itself.

7. Your choices

Cookies and tracking — open your cookie settings and change any category.
Marketing email — use the unsubscribe link in any marketing email, or write to privacy@tmfus.com.
Text messages — reply STOP to any message.
Telephone calls — tell the advisor, or write to privacy@tmfus.com, and we will stop calling and put you on our internal do-not-call list.
Sale and sharing — use the form in section 8.
A copy, a correction or deletion of your data — write to privacy@tmfus.com. See sections 9 and 10 for what we can do and how quickly.

Stopping marketing does not stop the operational messages we must send about an application you have already made, and does not undo a disclosure already made to a funder.

8. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

You have the right to tell us to stop selling and sharing your personal information, and to stop using it for targeted advertising. You do not have to give a reason, we will not charge you, and we will not treat you differently for asking.

The fastest way is to open your cookie settings and switch Advertising and Analytics off. That takes effect in your browser immediately.

To stop it everywhere, including with partners who already have your file, send us the request below. We will action it within 15 business days and confirm by email. If you use an authorized agent, send proof that they act for you.

9. California privacy rights

If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA gives you these rights.

To know what personal information we collected about you, where it came from, why we collected it, and who we disclosed it to.
To a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
To correct personal information that is wrong.
To delete personal information we hold, subject to the exceptions below.
To opt out of the sale and sharing of your personal information — section 8.
To limit the use of sensitive personal information. We use Social Security numbers, dates of birth and signatures to underwrite, verify and document your application and to place, syndicate, sell, service or collect the transaction — uses that are necessary to provide the service you asked us for. We do not use them to infer characteristics about you and we do not use them for advertising. If you want them restricted further, email privacy@tmfus.com and we will tell you what that means for a live application.
Not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights. We will not deny you service, charge you more, or give you a worse product because you asked.

What we sold or shared in the last twelve months: identifiers, commercial information, financial information, credit information, internet activity and sensitive personal information, disclosed to funders, lenders, other brokers, syndicators, buyers, servicers, verification services, and marketing and advertising partners, as described in section 5. Sensitive personal information — Social Security numbers, dates of birth and signatures — went only to parties working on a funding transaction, never to an advertising partner or a general data broker. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

How to make a request. Email privacy@tmfus.com, or use the form in section 8, or write to us at the address in section 15. We will verify your identity before we act, usually by matching what you send us against what we hold, and we may ask for more information if the request is for a copy of sensitive data. We respond within 45 days and may extend once by a further 45 days, telling you why. An authorized agent may act for you with written permission.

Deletion has limits. We may keep information we need to complete a transaction you asked for, to comply with a legal obligation such as anti-money- laundering record keeping, to detect and prevent fraud, or to establish or defend a legal claim. Where a funder already holds your file, you will need to ask them directly; we will tell you who they are.

10. Other state privacy rights

Residents of Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana and other states with comprehensive privacy laws have broadly similar rights — to know, to a copy, to correct, to delete, and to opt out of targeted advertising, the sale of personal data and certain profiling. Use the same routes in sections 7 and 8. If we refuse a request you may appeal by replying to our decision, and we will respond to the appeal within 45 days; if we refuse the appeal, you may complain to your state Attorney General.

Nevada residents may direct us not to sell their covered information by emailing privacy@tmfus.com.

11. Financial privacy notice

Because we arrange financing, some of what we hold is protected by the federal Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Under it:

We collect nonpublic personal information from your applications, your transactions, your bank statements and consumer reporting agencies.
We disclose it to nonaffiliated third parties — funders, lenders, other brokers, service providers and marketing partners — as permitted by law and as described in section 5.
You have the right to limit disclosures to nonaffiliated third parties for their own marketing purposes. To exercise it, email privacy@tmfus.com with the words “limit sharing”. It does not stop us sending your file to funders in order to place an application you have asked us to place.
We restrict access to your information to the people who need it, and we maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect it.

12. How we protect information

The application is built so that the most sensitive part of it cannot be read even by somebody who takes the whole server.

The site is served over HTTPS. Nothing personal is ever put in a web address, because addresses end up in logs and browser history.
Social Security numbers, dates of birth and signature images are encrypted the instant they arrive, with a public key held on the server and a private key that is not and never will be. They are decrypted only on an authorized device, never on the server.
Those fields are blocked, independently and in four different places, from reaching an email, a spreadsheet, a chat transcript or any plain-text file.
Bank statements are stored outside the public website folder, are not reachable from the internet, and are readable only by the account that runs the site.
The inbox where applications are read is password protected and does not itself have the ability to decrypt anything.

No system is perfect and we cannot promise absolute security. If a breach affects your information we will tell you and the relevant regulators as the law requires.

13. How long we keep it

We keep information for as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it, and then for as long as the law requires. In practice: an application and its documents are kept for the life of any resulting funding plus the record-keeping period the law imposes; an enquiry that never becomes an application is kept while it is still live commercially; and chat transcripts and website analytics are kept for a shorter period. You can ask us to delete your information sooner — see section 9.

14. Children

This site is for business owners. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, write to privacy@tmfus.com and we will delete it.

15. Changes, and how to reach us

We may update this policy. The version and date at the top of this page always show the current one, and a material change will be made obvious on the site. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it.

TMF Team
TO BE COMPLETED (business mailing address)
Privacy and data requests: privacy@tmfus.com
Everything else: the contact page
Our terms: Terms of Use and Service Agreement