Privacy
Privacy Policy
What we collect when you apply for and hold an account, why we hold it, and what you can ask us to do with it.
01Who we are
Gold Sika is operated by King-Nel Refineries (Pty) Ltd, Johannesburg, South Africa. We are the responsible party for the personal information described in this policy, which we handle in line with the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 (POPIA).
02What we collect
When you apply for an account we collect the details you enter on the application form: your name, date of birth, nationality, place of birth, gender, occupation, tax identification number, email address, telephone numbers, residential address and country of residence.
You also provide a recent photograph, an image of your identity document (driving licence or passport) and proof of address. These documents are uploaded during the application and stored privately, not on any public link.
We record the version of the Client Participation Agreement you accepted, together with the date and time of acceptance.
If you contact us, we keep the correspondence so we can answer you and keep a record of what was agreed.
03Why we use it
We use your information to assess your application, verify your identity, meet our anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing obligations, open and administer your account, issue and service your card, and communicate with you about your account.
We also use it to prevent fraud, to resolve disputes, to keep the records our regulators require, and to comply with court orders and lawful requests from authorities.
04Identity documents and photographs
Identity documents, selfies and proof-of-address documents are held in private storage with access limited to the compliance reviewers who assess your application and to the administrators responsible for the platform. They are never published and are not used for marketing.
We keep them for as long as your account is open and afterwards for the period our record-keeping obligations require.
06Transfers outside your country
Some of the providers above operate outside your country of residence, including in South Africa and the United States. Where we transfer personal information across borders we require the recipient to protect it to a standard comparable to this policy.
07How we protect it
Information travels over encrypted connections and is stored on access-controlled systems. Documents are held in private storage, reached only through short-lived signed links generated for authorised reviewers.
Access is limited to people who need it for the purposes above. We review our safeguards regularly, but no system is completely secure, and we will tell you and the regulator if a breach affects your information.
08How long we keep it
We keep application and identity records for at least five years after your account closes, or longer where a law, a regulator or an open dispute requires it. When a retention period ends we delete or anonymise the information.
09Your rights
You may ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct anything inaccurate or incomplete, ask us to delete information we no longer have a lawful reason to keep, and object to a particular use.
Write to info@vanguardinternationalsystems.com and we will respond within 30 days. If you are not satisfied, you may complain to the Information Regulator of South Africa.
11Changes and contact
We may update this policy as the service or the law changes. The version in force is the one published here, with its effective date.
Privacy questions and requests: info@vanguardinternationalsystems.com, King-Nel Refineries (Pty) Ltd, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Read this together with the Client Participation Agreement.