CENTRAL BANKS

Your privacy and the protection of your sensitive personal information are important to us. Because we collect and/or store certain types of information from and about you, it is necessary to explain our policy and the terms and conditions surrounding the capture and use of that information.

 

Employee Conduct

Ovamba expresses its absolute commitment to integrity, and our corporate values and ethical standards and the associated business conduct we expect from all our employees. The Ovamba Code of Conduct includes very specific guidelines concerning the safeguarding of confidential information, which includes customer information. In general, these guidelines limit employee access to confidential information, and limit the use and disclosure of such information to specifically authorized processes and transactions. If it is determined that employees have violated the Code of Conduct, corrective action may be taken, including immediate dismissal.

 

Verification of Practices

Periodically, our operations and business practices are reviewed for compliance with corporate policies and procedures governing the confidentiality of information. These reviews may be conducted by our own internal staff, external accounting and auditing firms, and government regulators. Included in these self-assessments and examinations are reviews of the controls and safeguards related to consumer privacy.

 

Introduction

This policy discloses which information we collect and how we use it, as well as the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. We also explain how any personal and/or personally identifiable information that we may request will be used; these explanations can usually be found on the same pages where the information is requested. We also detail below our security policy which describes how your personal information is protected both electronically and physically.

 

In general, and as described in detail below, we collect several types of information from you:

 

Personal information required to verify your identity

 

Personal and financial information necessary to assess your eligibility to borrow money or invest through Ovamba or one of its marketing partners.

 

Optional personal information you may wish to share in the furtherance of your goals in using our site

 

Information about your visits to and use of this web site or the web sites of third party servicers to help us maintain the appropriate features, functionality and user experience

 

Information We Collect From You and About You

We collect personal and financial information from you while you use the site, and most of this collection occurs during registration. Some information is required and some is optional, some will remain private and some will be displayed to other users. We always let you know which is which. Additional information may be gathered during your subsequent use of the site, whenever you choose to provide it.

 

Certain personal information must be supplied during the member, investor and Borrower or Investee Members registration processes, as indicated below, in order to (a) enable registered users to login to the site, (b) determine Borrower or Investee Members s’ eligibility for loan or revenue sharing investments through our proprietary credit scoring process, (c) verify Borrower or Investee Members s’ and investors’ identities, (d) establish Borrower or Investee Members s’ ability to request loan or revenue sharing investments and investors’ ability to invest by verifying that they are at least 18 years of age, and (e) guard against potential fraud. This basic personal information includes:

 

Your name (member registration)

 

Your email address (member registration)

 

Your date of birth (Borrower or Investee Members /investor registration)

 

Your home address and telephone number (Borrower or Investee Members /investor registration)

 

Your personal identification or government identification number (Borrower or Investee Members /investor registration)

 

When you register as a Borrower or Investee Members , we will use this information to pull a credit report from a credit bureau to determine your creditworthiness as well as to help investors assess your loan or revenue sharing investment request in the context of your overall financial situation. We will also use your required and optional information to facilitate activities and transactions that need to occur during the lending or investment process, such as:

 

Generating public Borrower or Investee Members profiles on the site

Assigning you a Borrower or Investee Members credit grade based on your credit history and financial circumstances

 

Enabling our financial services partners to implement automatic payments and fund transfers

 

Contacting you if there is a problem completing a transaction you requested or to discuss a problem with your account

 

Implementing collection activities as needed

Maintaining regular communications with you concerning transactions you initiate, such as requesting information or assistance, submitting a loan or revenue sharing investment request, making payments, transferring funds, etc.

 

When you register as an investor, we will request some required and optional data in order to facilitate such activities as:

 

Generating a public investor profile on the site

 

Enabling our financial services partners to verify identity, implement fund transfers and the receipt of Borrower or Investee Members payments

 

Enabling our financial services partners to implement automatic payments and fund transfers

 

Contacting you if there is a problem completing a transaction you requested or to discuss a problem with your account

 

Maintaining regular communications with you as may be necessary to execute transactions you request, such as submitting loan or revenue sharing investment portfolios and transferring funds, etc.

 

In addition, we gather names and email addresses of people who contact us through our web site with questions about our company or lending or investment /borrowing operations. We collect this information for the sole purpose of responding to such inquiries and do not store the contact information unless requested by these people, such as in the case of job applicants who submit resumes, etc.

 

Finally, we (and/or our service providers) collect information about your computer and your visits to our web site, such as your IP address, geographical location, browser type, referral source, length of visit, and page views through the use of log files. We (and/or our service providers) use this aggregated information in the administration of our web site to improve its usability and to evaluate the success of particular marketing/advertising campaigns, search engine optimization strategies and other marketing activities. We (and/or our service providers) use non-identifying and aggregated information to help optimize our web site based on the needs of our users.

 

We will retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

 

Tell-a-Friend and Other User Referral Activities

Users may choose to refer friends to the site or directly to their loan or revenue sharing investment listings via email. If this referral occurs independently of our site or a partner’s site, we do not track the referral other than as a unique page view. Since we do not collect any information from the referring party or the recipient of the external email referencing our site, we do not capture or store any information about either party. If friends refer each other to our site or to their loan or revenue sharing investment listings via a partner’s site, we will store and track information about the referring and receiving parties only long enough to determine the effectiveness of our marketing activities which contributed to the referral.

 

Our users can also refer friends to the site by completing a simple form to generate an email invitation. In this case, the email invitations do not track back to any particular loan or revenue sharing investment request, and the sender will not know whether you are a Borrower or Investee Members , investor or simply a member. The information collected in this process is only kept long enough to monitor whether the referral program is achieving the desired results in terms of attracting new visitors to the site and converting them into members. Again, these are messages initiated by friends of the recipients, and the recipients will not be added to any mailing list or contacted by Ovamba apart from this referral process, which may include invitation reminders. In the case where a bonus is offered to a member in return for the referral, Ovamba will only retain the information about the referred parties to properly credit the account of the member initiating the referral. The information is not used for any other purpose.

 

Communications from Our Site

When you register on our site you will receive emails that confirm specific actions you requested. You will receive notifications confirming your registration, the successful verification of email addresses and bank accounts, and confirmation of successful submissions of loan or revenue sharing investment requests and portfolios. You will also receive progress updates on the status of loan or revenue sharing investment requests and submitted portfolios. These are transactional notifications that you cannot opt out of receiving, as they are in place to protect the security of your account and your personal information. We may also send you responses to emails you send us, if appropriate or applicable. From time to time, we will also send user surveys, requests for user feedback regarding user experience and site operations or marketing offers from us or from us on behalf of our marketing partners. The completion of these surveys or requests for feedback or acceptance of any offer is strictly voluntary. If you do not wish to receive these offers, surveys or user feedback emails, please opt out in any offer email you receive from us.

 

Links to Third Party Websites

Ovamba is not responsible for the information practices employed by sites linked to or from our website. In most cases, links to non-Ovamba websites are provided solely as an access point to obtain information on products and topics that may be useful to the users of the Ovamba website. Third party websites may have different privacy policies and/or security standards governing their sites.

 

How and When Your Information Is Shared With Other Parties

Information is shared with other parties in the following ways:

 

Required and optional information about Borrower or Investee Members s and investors is displayed on public profiles that members can update at any time; certain information is optional and you can choose not to supply it and/or can remove the optional information at any time. Ovamba may, but is not obligated to, monitor any entered optional information to assist in the protection of your identity.

 

Personal but not sensitive information about Borrower or Investee Members s is contained in loan or revenue sharing investment listings that can be viewed by all users and is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and as such is made publicly available.

 

Financial and credit information about Borrower or Investee Members s is displayed to qualified investors on loan or revenue sharing investment listing pages, is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and as such is made publicly available, and is contained anonymously in loan or revenue sharing investment data files available on the statistics page.

 

Information is shared directly between users and other or potential users. Information shared directly by users might contain personal information.

 

Ovamba may, with your consent, share required and optional information about you.

For privacy purposes, Borrower or Investee Members s and investors remain anonymous on the site and are identified only by their chosen screen names. Borrower or Investee Members s will be able to see the screen names of their investors and vice versa. However, Borrower or Investee Members s have public profiles and loan or revenue sharing investment listings on the site that display their information to any users who view these pages. The loan or revenue sharing investment listing pages include Borrower or Investee Members s’ credit grades and other financial information that is shown to qualified investors so that they can effectively evaluate loan or revenue sharing investment requests. As noted above, this information is also contained anonymously in loan or revenue sharing investment data files available on the statistics page. Loan or revenue sharing investment listings also contain certain personal information and, in some cases, answers to questions posed by investors, Borrower or Investee Members created loan or revenue sharing investment titles and loan or revenue sharing investment descriptions that are incorporated into loan or revenue sharing investment listings. Investors also have public profiles on the site containing personal information that they have opted to include. Finally, members creating blog/forum posts are also identified by their screen names.

 

To protect Borrower or Investee Members s’ and investors’ privacy, however, the blog/forum posts do not track back to loan or revenue sharing investment listings or loan or revenue sharing investment funding decisions, respectively. Ovamba is not responsible for any personal information that Borrower or Investee Members s or investors may choose to reveal about themselves in their screen names, loan or revenue sharing investment requests, blogs, or public profiles or blog/forum posts. Given the community nature of any person-to-person transaction site, however, it may be in the best interests of Borrower or Investee Members s and investors to share some level of personal information in order to achieve a satisfactory outcome (i.e., it may be necessary for you to share a certain amount of personal information in order for your loan or revenue sharing investment to receive full funding).

 

If you use our blog on this site, you should be aware that any personal information you submit there can be read, collected, or used by other users of this forum, and could be used to send you unsolicited messages. We are not responsible for the personal information you choose to submit in this forum. To request removal of your personal information from our blog, contact us at privacy@Ovamba.com.

 

We may share your information with law enforcement or other government agencies as required by law or for the purposes of limiting fraud. We reserve the right to disclose your personal information when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights and/or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process served on our Web site.

 

Ovamba works with a number of trusted partners that perform vital functions as part of our operations, including credit bureaus, collection agencies, electronic payment service providers, and customer support call centers. Information is shared with these third parties only to the extent necessary for us to process the transactions you initiate or perform other specific services, like collections. Our partners are legally required to keep your information private and secure.

 

Testimonials

We display personal testimonials of satisfied customers on our site in addition to other endorsements. With your consent we may post your testimonial along with your name. If you wish to update or delete your testimonial, you can contact us at privacy@Ovamba.com.

 

How Your Credit History and Ovamba Loan or revenue sharing investment Data Are Shared

When you create a loan or revenue sharing investment listing, you will be posting personal information on the site that will be visible to all users. This information includes details about your loan or revenue sharing investment request, as well as your screen name, geographic location, Ovamba credit grade and a description of the loan or revenue sharing investment request.

 

Qualified Ovamba investors will also see certain credit data collected from or calculated based on your credit bureau file. It is necessary to allow prospective investors to see this information as they evaluate your loan or revenue sharing investment request. The information displayed to investors includes a credit profile section and a credit history section. As noted above, this information is also contained anonymously in loan or revenue sharing investment data files available on the statistics page.

 

The credit profile section includes your:

 

National credit score or credit blacklist status

 

Debt-to-income ratio (DTI)

 

Gross income

 

Home ownership status

 

Current business performance

 

Existing debt payments (monthly snapshot of your current outstanding debt)

 

Monthly payment amount for the loan or revenue sharing investment being requested And other factors we believe important to evaluating credit risk

 

If you successfully receive a loan or revenue sharing investment through Ovamba, we will also display status information about your loan or revenue sharing investment to your investors. Your loan or revenue sharing investment tracks back to you by your screen name, so it is important that you choose a screen name that will protect your anonymity. You should not choose a screen name that resembles your actual name or that of any other person. Further, you should not include your name or personally identifiable information in your loan or revenue sharing investment request. Your payment performance information such as late payments, collections activity or any other instances of delinquency will be displayed to your investors. Loan or revenue sharing investment status information is also aggregated and displayed on the statistics page.

 

Notifications

Ovamba will send you email notifications from time to time, and these are required elements of your transactions on our web site, such as confirmations of particular actions you have taken. These required notices are sent typically to notify you of a change in status such as when you are confirmed as a Borrower or Investee Members or investor, or for legal or security purposes. For example, certain notifications are sent for your own protection to ensure that no one can make a change to your account without your knowledge, such as confirming the addition of a new email address or linked external bank account. These notifications are sent to you so that you can be assured that no one is making changes to your account without your knowledge. In other cases, these notifications involve changes to various legal agreements or site policies. Generally you may not opt out of these service related emails.

 

Where You Can Find and/or Correct Your Information

You can access all of your personal information that we collect online and maintain by visiting your profile in the My Account section of our site. This section of the site is password-protected to better safeguard your information. As a registered user, you can update your password, email address, physical address, phone number and bank account information at any time on the website, and if you need to change any other information in your profile you can contact us at support@Ovamba.com. To protect your privacy and security, please contact us at support@Ovamba.com to make changes to your sensitive account information.

 

Web-related Information Collection

We use web beacons or pixel tags, which are tiny graphics, in conjunction with cookies on our web site, including session ID cookies, non-persistent cookies and persistent cookies. A cookie is a text file sent by a web server to a web browser, and stored by the browser. The text file is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. This enables the web server to identify and track the web browser and load the pages according to a user’s preferences for that particular site, including the personalization of content. Cookies are also used to gather statistical data, such as which pages are visited, what is downloaded, the ISP’s domain name and country of origin, and the addresses of sites visited before and after coming to our site, as well as your "click stream" activity (meaning, the paths taken by visitors to our site as they navigate from page to page) and transactional attributes in accordance with information you voluntarily submit in the course of using our site. This data is aggregated for analysis to ensure proper functioning of our site, in terms of navigation and usability, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing efforts. At no time do any of our cookies capture any personal information. More importantly, using cookies also helps us protect the security of your account. Session ID cookies follow your activities on our site so that we can ensure that no one is making changes to your profile, applying for loan or revenue sharing investments or making loan or revenue sharing investments on your behalf. This information is encrypted and no personal data about you is stored on our servers.

 

We may send a cookie that can be stored by your browser on your computer’s hard drive. We may use the information we obtain from the cookie in the administration of our web site, to improve its usability and for evaluating our marketing effectiveness as described above. We may also use that information to recognize your computer when you visit our web site (if you select the "remember me on this computer" option, and to personalize our web site for you. Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies. (For example, in Internet Explorer you can refuse all cookie by clicking "Tools", "Internet Options", "Privacy", and selecting "Block all cookies" using the sliding selector). Blocking cookies, however, can also have a negative impact on the usability of many web sites.

 

Cookies may have long-term expiration dates, or none, and thus can stay in your hard drive for months at a time. While you can remove them as instructed by the help content in your chosen browser, disabling cookies will prevent you from using our site. As with many transactional web sites, cookies must be enabled in order to use our site.

 

We use third-party tracking services (e.g. Omniture, Google Analytics) that use cookies to track non-personal information about visitors to our site in the aggregate (such as web page views and referral page information to track the success of our marketing efforts to bring people to our site as well as overall site performance). We use respective web beacons to gather information that lets us tune and improve our users’ browsing experience, as well as track user responsiveness to various advertising campaigns and user activities. As with cookies, the information these beacons collect is aggregated, anonymous "click stream" and transactional data, and is not associated with any users as individuals. No personal or sensitive information is transmitted to advertising partners (but some partners may use incoming IP addresses to avoid double-counting the number of new members who joined as a result of the advertising campaign).

 

If you would like more information about the use of third-party cookies and tags, or the process of opting out of such cookies or tags, please visit

 

http://www.omniture.com/privacy/product#optout and

 

http://www.google.com/privacy.html.

 

Compliance with State and Federal Laws

This privacy policy may not constitute your entire set of privacy rights, as these may also vary from state to state. To be certain of your privacy rights, you may wish to contact the appropriate agency in your state that is charged with overseeing privacy rights of consumers. Certain regulations issued by state and/or federal government agencies may require us to maintain and report demographic information on the collective activities of our membership. We may also be required to maintain your personal information for at least seven years in order to be in compliance with applicable federal and state laws regarding recordkeeping, reporting and audits.

 

Links to Other Sites

We may offer links to partners’ sites. We make the decision to provide links to these sites based on the quality of information provided at the time the links are enabled or to facilitate our customers’ more effective use of our platform, and we make every effort to monitor the continuing quality of content provided on these sites. However, these external sites are not subject to this privacy policy and may have different privacy policies or approaches to the handling of information. Further, Ovamba has no control over the content of these sites. Please consult the privacy policies on these sites before you provide them with any of your personal information.

 

Ovamba Security Policy

Industry-leading standards and controls

 

Ovamba takes strong steps to safeguard your personal and sensitive information through vigorous physical, electronic and operational policies and practices. All data is considered highly confidential. Data can only be read or written through defined service access points, the use of which is password-protected. The physical security of the data is achieved through a combination of network firewalls (there is no direct communication allowed between the database server and the Internet) and servers with hardened operating systems, all housed in a secure facility. Access to the system, both physical and electronic, is controlled and sanctioned by a high-ranking manager.

 

Further, we also equip our servers with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate technology to ensure that you when you connect to our web site you are actually on our site. SSL also ensures that all data entered into the web site is encrypted. To verify that SSL is being used, look for the key or padlock icon on your browser. For further encryption protection, we use a 128-bit secure browser for logins and transactions. Portions of our site also make use of "CAPTCHA" technology, which is a test that we use to ensure certain sensitive transactions are being initiated by a human and not by another computer. The test involves viewing a distorted image of a word that a computer would not be able to interpret and then entering in the text shown in the image. Finally, we subject our systems to periodic security audits to ensure that your information is thoroughly protected and secure.

 

Secure, off-site hosting

We store all sensitive financial data such as Social Security numbers and bank accounts in a highly secure environment.

 

Session time-outs

We also employ session time-outs to protect your account. You will be logged out of the site automatically after a specified period of inactivity. This time-out feature reduces the risk of others being able to access your account if you leave your computer unattended.

 

Protection of account numbers

When we contact you about your account to confirm a funds transfer, we only reference the last four digits of your bank account number; this is done for your protection so that you will recognize the source or destination account as one which you own. Further, we employ strict access standards ensuring that only the senior-most employees or partner representatives have access to your account numbers and other sensitive information. This access is only granted in order to complete transactions which you request or to provide regular ongoing service to your account.

 

Passwords

At a minimum, we require the use of numbers, symbols and letters in your password – with a minimum of 8 characters. We have also instituted secure steps by which you can regain access to your account should you forget your password, including the use of a security question. Your password is not known to any employee or third party with whom we may partner, and we will never ask for your password as a means of identifying yourself. You should never share your password with anyone, and if you ever receive an email purporting to come from Ovamba that asks for your password, you should immediately report this development.

 

ID theft policy

Ovamba utilizes state of the art authentication technology to verify identities. However, if an investor suspects that one of their loan or revenue sharing investments belongs to a person who has committed ID theft, please contact us at security@Ovamba.com. Ovamba will work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute anyone who has committed identity theft. Ovamba will reimburse the investor for the unpaid principal balance of loan or revenue sharing investments where the Borrower or Investee Members has committed identity theft.

 

What you can do

In addition to our own substantial efforts, you can take several precautions to protect the security of your computer and personal information. For instance, you can start by using a well-chosen password. You should avoid using any information that others can easily learn about you, such as a family member’s name or birthday, and you can also use special characters in place of letters. We also recommend that you change your password frequently. You can also install and regularly update antivirus and firewall software to protect your computer from external attacks by malicious users. When you are finished with a session on our site, be sure that you log out and close the browser window.

 

To protect your account, we send automatic notifications confirming certain actions taken on your account, such as changes to a password or external linked account. We do this for your own protection so that you can be sure no one else is making changes to your account without your knowledge. However, the security offered through these notifications can be undermined if other people have access to your email account. Therefore, you might consider restricting access to the email account you registered with on this site and/or changing your password on that email account frequently.

 

If you use a computer that is accessed by other people, such as in a public library or Internet cafe, we recommend that you take special precautions to protect the security of your account and personal data. When you are finished using our site, you should log out completely, then close the browser window and clear the browser’s cache files.

 

You should also be aware of fraudulent attempts to gain access to your account information known as "phishing." Phishing is a tactic used by scammers in which unsuspecting people are brought to a web site by a genuine-looking email purporting to be from a legitimate company. The phony or "spoof" email takes the person to a web site that looks legitimate but in fact is not. Either in the email itself or on this fake site, scammers will ask for login information to gain access to people’s accounts and withdraw their money. Ovamba will never ask you for your login information in the context of any email. In general, you can protect yourself against phishing by never providing personal or login information via an email—instead, go the web site directly. You might also make it a habit to check the URL of a web site to be sure that it begins with the correct domain. In the case of Ovamba, you should always ensure the URL begins with http://www.Ovamba.co.uk, http://www.ovamba.co.za

We May Make Changes to This Policy

As technologies, laws and user needs change, our site and its features will also change. This policy may be updated from time to time as such needs dictate, and we will always communicate these changes to you by posting them on this web site and/or by notifying you via email in the event of any substantive or material changes.

 

You may contact us at:

Ovamba Solutions Incorporated

5425 wisconsin avenue

Suite 600

Chevy Chase, MD 20815

 

If Ovamba is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, you will be notified via email and/or a prominent notice on our Web site of any change in ownership or uses of your personal information, as well as any choices you may have regarding your information