Privacy & Cookie Policy

1. Who we are

Talent Ascent Ltd (“Talent Ascent”, “we”, “us”) is the data controller responsible for your personal data. We are a company registered in England and Wales (company no. 16736436), registered office 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, and registered with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office under reference ZC042741. Contact: contact@talentascent.io.

Where you are in the European Economic Area, references in this policy to the UK GDPR should be read as including the EU GDPR as it applies to you; the legal bases we rely on are the same under both.

2. Who this policy covers

This policy covers: website visitors; people who contact us or whom we contact about our services (prospects and business contacts); client personnel we work with during engagements; and buyers paying for services. If your information may be included in talent research we conduct for clients (for example market maps or succession research), our separate Privacy Notice for Talent Research applies to that processing.

We work business-to-business. We do not knowingly collect data about children, and we do not sell personal data.

3. What we collect

Information you give us — contact-form submissions (name, work email, company, company stage, message); correspondence by email or messaging; information shared during engagements (names, roles and business contact details of client personnel; materials your company provides). Free-tool submissions — when you download your results from one of our calculators, the name and work email you enter. The figures you entered and the results the tool produced are sent to us alongside them, so that we can see the scenario the request relates to. Those figures can include commercially sensitive planning information such as salary, monthly burn, remaining runway and funding stage. The calculators compute on our servers, so the figures you enter are transmitted to us to produce each result, but they are not stored at that stage and exist only for as long as the calculation takes to run. It is the download request that sends us a copy we retain, so if you would rather we did not hold your figures, use the calculator without submitting the download form. Shared calculator results and downloads — if you choose to share your results or download them as a PDF, we store the figures you entered so that the link can reproduce them for whoever you send it to, and so that the document can be built on our servers. This is the one other point at which calculator figures are kept rather than discarded, and it happens only when you press a share button. The link does not include your name, your email address or the role title you typed, and anyone holding the link can see the figures, so share it only with people you would show the numbers to. On the runway calculator you can leave your monthly burn and remaining runway out of the link. Shared links expire automatically. Information we collect about business contacts — professional details from public and professional sources (such as LinkedIn profiles, company websites and business directories) used to identify and contact companies that may benefit from our services: name, role, employer, business contact details. Order and billing information — company details, billing contact, order details and payment status (see Section 6 for what we never receive). Technical data — our hosting provider automatically logs limited technical information (IP address, browser type, pages requested) to deliver and secure the site. Consent preferences — your cookie/privacy choice, stored in your browser’s local storage.

4. Why we use it, and our legal bases

We do not carry out automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects about you.

5. Business outreach

Where we contact people at companies we believe may benefit from our services, we use professional contact details relevant to their role, gathered from professional and public sources, or given to us directly — including the work email you enter to download results from one of our free calculators, which we tell you about at the point you enter it. We contact business capacities only, we identify ourselves clearly, and every message offers a straightforward way to opt out. If you ask us to stop, we suppress your details rather than merely deleting them, so you are not contacted again.

This outreach runs on legitimate interests rather than consent, which is why we do not ask you to tick a marketing box: we tell you plainly that we may contact you, and we honour any objection. You can object before we ever write to you, and you do not need a reason.

6. Payments

Card and bank payments are handled by our payment providers on their secure, hosted payment pages. Card details are entered directly with the provider and never reach our systems. Our providers act as independent controllers of payment data for purposes such as fraud prevention, security and financial compliance, under their own privacy notices. We receive confirmation of payment, the payment method type, and the billing details needed for our records — not card numbers.

7. Who we share data with

We use carefully selected service providers who process data on our behalf under contract: Cloudflare (website hosting, content delivery, and bot protection — including Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks that contact-form and calculator requests come from a person rather than an automated script; see Section 12), Resend (contact-form email delivery), Google Workspace (email and document storage), Notion (client and prospect relationship records), Clinked (our client portal — secure exchange and storage of engagement materials, including any documents and data you submit for a report, audit or design engagement), FreeAgent (invoicing and accounting), and our payment providers (payment processing — see Section 6). We may also share data with professional advisers (accountants, lawyers, insurers) under confidentiality, and with authorities where the law requires. We do not sell personal data and we do not use advertising trackers.

8. International transfers

Some providers are based outside the UK/EEA (for example, in the United States). Where personal data is transferred internationally, we rely on UK adequacy regulations or appropriate safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

9. How long we keep it

We keep personal data only as long as needed for the purposes described, then delete or anonymise it: contracts, invoices, tax and accounting records — 6 years from the end of the relevant financial year (legal requirement); engagement deliverables and correspondence — 6 years from the end of the engagement (aligned to the legal limitation period); personal data gathered in talent research — no longer than 12 months after delivery of the engagement (see the Privacy Notice for Talent Research); prospect and business-contact data — 24 months from our last meaningful contact, or immediately suppressed on objection; free-tool downloads — 24 months from the last time you used one of our calculators, which is set automatically when you download and reset each time you use a tool again, flagged for review a month before and then deleted; contact-form enquiries that do not become engagements — 24 months; shared calculator results — 12 months from the moment the link is created, after which the stored figures are deleted automatically and the link stops working; technical logs — a short period for security and diagnostics; analytics data — as set out in Section 12.

10. Security

We protect personal data with appropriate technical and organisational measures, including encryption in transit, access controls on a least-privilege basis, reputable providers with strong security practices, and retention limits enforced by scheduled deletion.

11. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to access, rectify, erase, restrict or object to our processing of your personal data, the right to data portability, and the right to withdraw consent at any time where processing is based on consent. Objections to business outreach are always honoured. To exercise any right, email contact@talentascent.io; we respond within one month and may need to verify your identity.

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority — although we would welcome the chance to resolve your concerns first.

Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF
Helpline: 0303 123 1113 · ico.org.uk

If you are in the EU or EEA, you may instead complain to the supervisory authority in your own country — for example the DPC (Ireland), the CNIL (France), your Land data-protection authority (Germany) or the AP (Netherlands). The European Data Protection Board keeps a full list at edpb.europa.eu.

12. Cookies and local storage

We keep this minimal. Everything we store in your browser is first-party, is set only when you take an action that asks us to remember something, and identifies nothing about you beyond the preference itself:

The bot-protection check itself is performed by Cloudflare Turnstile (see Section 7): when you use the contact form or a calculator, it examines technical signals from your browser to distinguish people from automated scripts. It shows no puzzle in the normal case, does not track you across sites, and is not used for advertising.

None of these require consent under PECR: each is essential to providing a service you explicitly requested — remembering a choice you made, or protecting the forms you are using from automated abuse. Page-view statistics — we use Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views and referring sites. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device and does not identify you, so it runs without consent. Usage statistics — we also count which pages and tools are used (for example, that a calculator was completed or a report downloaded). This is sent to our own server, sets no cookie and carries nothing that identifies you, so it too runs without consent. Marketing — off by default and loads only after you opt in. You can change your mind at any time via Manage cookie settings in the site footer.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected here with a revised “last updated” date, and where required we will ask for your consent again.

14. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data? Email contact@talentascent.io.