A provider of services to letting agents has opened a ‘technology hub’ in India.
LetAlliance, which provides a broad range of referencing and insurance products including rent guarantees and nil deposits, has launched the facility in Gandhinagar.
Let Alliance Tech Hub India becomes a wholly owned subsidiary, and is entirely dedicated to developing the firm’s proposition for letting agents.
The 125-strong existing team in Chester remains unchanged.
The move follows the appointment of Mark Ker-Lindsay as the firm’s chief technology officer, and a decision to plough £1m into technology.
Let Alliance CEO Andy Halstead said: “This further investment is coming from earnings.
“We work with more than 2,000 letting agents and 2018 was a record year for us. We are ploughing money back into our business, making sure our customers remain ahead of the game.”
Comments (5)
Great! So our data will be sent to India now! I don’t know much about GDPR but this doesn’t sound legal!!!
No need to worry @South facing we do not send any customer data to our Tech Hub in India. Data is stored in our data centre located in Sheffield & Chester and managed by our UK based IT partners Birchenall Howden. Our development team in India focus’ on the development of our systems and from time to time may need to access data via the data centre, however is not transferred outside of the E.U. Our Tech Hub team are code developers, they are not customer facing. Strategy and systems design is developed in the UK. All of the Let Alliance customer facing activities are UK based. Data management is performed in the UK, access to customer data is strictly audited and at no point does the data leave our UK data centre. Data in transit is encrypted and the database employ encryption at rest technology. Let Alliance is a regulated business and complies with UK regulation. You can find the Let Alliance Privacy Policy here; http://www.letalliance.co.uk
from time to time may need to access data via the data centre, however is not transferred outside of the E.U.
If your developers in India can read the data on their screens then it has been transferred and processed outside the EU. As the developers work for a subsidiary, you will need to check your GDPR compliance and update your privacy notice to inform your customers their data can be sent to India.
I have asked another referencing agency this but they never responded. What GDPR grounds do you use to process Landlords’ data when you are taking a reference? I have had tenants pass my data on without my permission and as the request for a reference caused me significant harm (the tenant wasn’t getting a good reference) my interpretation is that none of the grounds apply.
If you would like to discuss further, please contact me directly at; andy.halstead@letalliance.co.uk
A big thank you to everyone involved. It’s great to be part of such a progressive business. The market has never been tougher for our customers, this is the time to invest and deliver everything they need. Of all the options that businesses have, standing still is never on the list.