Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 6, 2026

Effective date: September 6, 2026

This Privacy Policy describes how Instant Credit S.E.C, styled INSTANT.CREDIT S.E.C — a limited partnership (société en commandite) constituted under the law of Quebec and registered in Ontario as an extra-provincial limited partnership under Business Identification Number 1001496851, acting through its general partner, Credit Inc., and carrying on business from 2233 Argentia Road, Unit 302, Mississauga, Ontario L5N 2X7 (“INSTANT.CREDIT”, “we”, “us”, “our”) — collects, uses, discloses, retains, and protects personal information in the course of operating the website at payday.instant.credit (the “Site”) and of lending money to consumers in Ontario (the “Services”).

A limited partnership is not a corporation. It has no articles of incorporation and no board of directors. Under article 2236 of the Civil Code of Québec, the general partner is the only partner authorized to administer and bind a limited partnership; every act described in this Policy as an act of INSTANT.CREDIT is an act of the partnership carried out through its general partner.

We are licensed as a payday lender in Ontario under the Payday Loans Act, 2008, S.O. 2008, c. 9 (the “PLA”), licence number 4741682, issued 3 September 2026 and expiring 3 September 2027. We lend as principal — we are the lender, not a broker and not a lead generator — and we lend only to residents of Ontario. Our only product is a single-payment payday loan of up to $1,500 for a term of 62 days or less, for personal, family, or household purposes.

1. Scope of this Policy

“Personal information” means information about an identifiable individual. This Policy applies to the personal information of everyone who visits the Site, starts or submits an application, or holds a loan with us. It does not apply to business information that identifies no individual — we do not make business-purpose loans.

This Policy applies in addition to our Terms and Conditions, to the consents you give when you apply, and to your loan agreement. Where you have given a specific written consent, that consent governs the matter it addresses.

2. The Law That Applies

Ontario has not enacted a general private-sector privacy statute. Our handling of personal information is therefore governed by the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, S.C. 2000, c. 5 (“PIPEDA”), which applies to personal information that an organization collects, uses, or discloses in the course of commercial activity. The fair information principles in Schedule 1 to PIPEDA — accountability, identifying purposes, consent, limiting collection, limiting use, disclosure and retention, accuracy, safeguards, openness, individual access, and challenging compliance — are the framework this Policy follows.

Other laws shape what we may do with your information, in particular the PLA and Ontario Regulation 98/09 made under it, the Consumer Protection Act, 2002, S.O. 2002, c. 30, Sched. A, the Consumer Reporting Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. C.33, and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation, S.C. 2010, c. 23 (“CASL”).

Quebec’s private-sector privacy legislation does not govern this Site or this product. A payday loan of the kind described here cannot lawfully be offered to a resident of Quebec, and we do not offer it there.

3. Privacy Officer

We are accountable for the personal information under our control, including information we transfer to a service provider for processing. We have designated a Privacy Officer who is responsible for our compliance with this Policy and with PIPEDA, and who is the contact point for every question, access request, and complaint about personal information.

• Email: privacy@instant.credit

• Telephone: (514) 600-0924

• Mail: Privacy Officer, INSTANT.CREDIT S.E.C, 2233 Argentia Road, Unit 302, Mississauga, Ontario L5N 2X7

4. Personal Information We Collect

We collect only what we need for the purposes set out in section 5. Assessing a payday loan application requires a close look at your income and your recent banking activity, because Ontario law fixes how much we may advance by reference to your net pay, and fixes your due date by reference to your next regular income date. That is why the list below is specific.

4.1 Information you give us

• Identity and contact details — full legal name, date of birth, residential address in Ontario, email address, mobile and other telephone numbers.

• Income and employment details — your source of income (employment, pension, or government benefits), your employer or payer, how often you are paid, the date of your next regular income, and your net pay for the period.

• Banking details — the financial institution, transit, and account number used to send you the advance and to take repayment.

• Application content — everything you enter in the application form or tell us by telephone, email, text message, or chat, and any document you upload, such as a pay stub, a bank statement, or proof of address.

• Identity documents — a government-issued identity document, and any image of it captured to verify your identity.

We do not require your Social Insurance Number in order to consider your application, and you are not obliged to give it to us. If you choose to provide it, we use it only to identify you accurately to a consumer reporting agency.

We do not ask for — and you should not send us — information about your health, race, religion, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. None of it is relevant to a lending decision.

4.2 Information from the secure bank connection

Rather than asking you to gather and send statements, we offer a secure bank connection operated on our behalf by Flinks Technology Inc.. If you use it:

• You enter your online banking credentials on the provider’s own secure interface. We never see, receive, or store your online banking password.

• The connection returns a read-only view of the accounts you select: account and holder details, current and available balances, and a history of transactions, typically covering the preceding 90 days.

• From that history we look at your deposits and their regularity, your net pay and pay dates, rent, loan and other committed payments, overdraft and non-sufficient-funds activity, and payments to other payday lenders.

• The connection is a point-in-time retrieval. It does not allow us to move money, and we do not maintain ongoing access to your account after the check unless you separately agree to it.

• If you would rather not connect your account, you may ask us to consider your application on the basis of bank statements you provide instead, and we will tell you whether we are able to do so.

4.3 Information we collect from others

• Consumer reports — a credit report, a credit score, or both, obtained from a consumer reporting agency with the express consent described in section 7.

• Identity verification and fraud prevention — the results of checks run by providers acting on our behalf, which may include confirming your identity document, matching your details against reference databases, and device and fraud-risk signals. Where a check requires you to photograph your identity document and yourself, those images are used only to verify your identity.

• Payment information — confirmation from payment processors and financial institutions that a transfer was sent, received, returned, or dishonoured.

• References and verifications — information from a person or organization you have expressly authorized us to contact, such as your employer, to verify what you have told us.

4.4 Records we create in the course of the Services

• Application and decision records — the assessment we carried out, the decision, and the reasons for it.

• Agreement records — your loan agreement, evidence that the agreement and the required statements were made available to you before you entered into it, your electronic signature, and the associated audit trail (timestamps, IP address, and a record of the document you accepted).

• Account records — the amount advanced, the cost of borrowing, the due date, payments made, any cancellation, any extended payment plan, and any default charge.

• Communications — emails, text messages, and chat transcripts exchanged with us, and recordings or notes of telephone calls where you have been told at the outset that the call may be recorded.

4.5 Information collected automatically on the Site

When you visit the Site, our hosting infrastructure records standard server-log information — IP address, browser and device type, the page requested, and the time of the request — which we use to operate and secure the Site. Section 16 describes the Site’s use of cookies and similar technologies in full.

5. Why We Collect It

We collect, use, and disclose personal information for the following purposes, and for no others without your consent:

• (a) to confirm who you are, that you are at least 18 years old, and that you live in Ontario;

• (b) to assess your application — your income, your banking history, and your creditworthiness — and to decide whether to lend, and how much. Every application is assessed. All credit is welcome, but approval is based on your income and banking history and is never guaranteed;

• (c) to apply the limits Ontario law places on us: the $1,500 ceiling and the 62-day maximum term (PLA s. 32(1)); the rule that a single payday loan may not advance more than 50% of your net pay for the pay period (O. Reg. 98/09, s. 16.2(3)); the rule that the term may not end before your next regular income date (O. Reg. 98/09, s. 34(1)); the rule that we may not make you a new payday loan until seven days after the outstanding balance of your previous loan with us has been paid in full (PLA s. 35(1)); and the rule that a third or subsequent loan with us within a 63-day period must be made as an extended payment plan (O. Reg. 98/09, s. 25.1(2));

• (d) to prepare your loan agreement, to give you the disclosures the law requires before you enter into it, and to record that you received them;

• (e) to send you the advance and to take repayment;

• (f) to administer your loan, including a cancellation within the two-business-day window, an extended payment plan, early repayment, and collection of amounts owing;

• (g) to communicate with you about your application, your loan, and the Services, including by text message as described in section 15;

• (h) to detect, investigate, and prevent fraud, identity theft, unauthorized account access, and other unlawful activity;

• (i) to keep the records we are required to keep as a licensee, and to produce them to the Registrar of Payday Loan Services or the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery when required;

• (j) with your separate consent, to send you commercial electronic messages about our products and services;

• (k) to comply with our legal obligations and to respond to a court order, subpoena, warrant, or other lawful demand.

We do not sell personal information. We do not rent it, trade it, or otherwise make it available to anyone for that person’s own marketing purposes.

6. Consent

We collect personal information directly from you wherever we can, and from a third party only with your consent or where the law permits. Consent may be express or implied depending on the sensitivity of the information and the circumstances. Financial information, banking transaction data, income details, and consumer reports are sensitive, and we collect and use them only with your express consent, given at the point in the application where the collection happens.

Consent to receive marketing is never a condition of getting a loan. You may apply, be assessed, and be funded without agreeing to receive a single marketing message.

You may withdraw your consent at any time, on reasonable notice, by contacting the Privacy Officer. We will tell you what withdrawing consent means in practice. If you withdraw before we make a decision, we will stop assessing your application and it will not proceed. Withdrawal does not extend to information we must keep in order to administer a loan already advanced, to enforce our rights, or to satisfy a legal or regulatory record-keeping obligation, and it does not undo anything lawfully done while the consent was in effect.

7. Consumer Reports and Credit Reporting

We may obtain a consumer report about you — a credit report, a credit score, or both — from a consumer reporting agency registered in Ontario. In Canada these are principally Equifax Canada Co. and TransUnion of Canada, Inc. We may do so when you apply and, where you have consented, during the term of your loan for the purposes of administering it and collecting amounts owing.

The Consumer Reporting Act (Ontario) requires that you be told in writing that a consumer report may be obtained about you. This section, together with the express consent you give when you submit an application, is that notice. You may ask us for the name and address of any consumer reporting agency from which we obtained a report about you. You have the right to see your own file at that agency and to have inaccurate information in it corrected.

A credit check is part of how we assess an application; we do not offer, and do not advertise, credit without an assessment. A low credit score does not rule you out on its own, because we weigh your income and your banking history alongside it.

We may report information about your loan, including your payment history, to a consumer reporting agency. A missed payment can affect your ability to obtain credit from us or from anyone else.

8. Who We Disclose Personal Information To

We disclose personal information only as described here:

• Service providers acting on our behalf — our application and loan-servicing platform; our bank-connection provider (Flinks Technology Inc.); identity-verification and fraud-prevention providers; payment processors and the financial institutions that carry the advance and the repayment; our electronic-signature provider; our telephone, text-message, and email providers; our cloud hosting and document-storage providers; a collection agency registered in Ontario, where an account goes to collections; and our auditors and professional advisers.

• Consumer reporting agencies, as described in section 7.

• Public authorities — the Registrar of Payday Loan Services, the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, a court, a law enforcement agency, or any other body, where we are required or permitted by law to do so.

• A successor or assignee, in connection with a sale, financing, securitization, or other transfer of all or part of our business or of our loan portfolio, subject to confidentiality protections appropriate to the transaction. Your loan agreement and this Policy continue to apply to the information transferred.

• Anyone you direct us to, on your written instruction.

When we transfer personal information to a service provider for processing, we remain accountable for it. We use contract or other means to require the provider to use the information only for the purpose we specify, to keep it confidential, to protect it with safeguards comparable to our own, and to return or destroy it when the work is done.

9. Information Processed Outside Ontario

Some of our service providers store or process personal information outside Ontario, including elsewhere in Canada and in the United States. Information located in another jurisdiction is subject to the laws of that jurisdiction, and may be accessible to its courts, its law enforcement, and its national-security authorities.

Transferring information for processing does not transfer accountability for it. We remain responsible under PIPEDA for information in the hands of a processor acting for us, and we require contractual protection of a comparable standard before any transfer. You may ask the Privacy Officer where information about you is processed and what protections apply to it.

10. How Long We Keep It

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purposes in section 5, or as long as the law requires. As a general rule:

• Applications that are declined or abandoned — twenty-four (24) months from the decision or from the last activity on the application, after which the file is destroyed or de-identified. We keep a limited record for that period so that we can explain a past decision to you and detect repeat fraudulent applications;

• Loans — seven (7) years after the loan is repaid, cancelled, or otherwise comes to an end, covering our record-keeping obligations as a licensee, the periods during which a claim or a regulatory review may arise, and tax and audit requirements;

• Bank-connection data — retained as part of the application or loan file, for the periods above. Access to your account is not maintained after the retrieval;

• Call recordings — no longer than twenty-four (24) months, unless a recording is relevant to a dispute, a complaint, or a legal proceeding, in which case it is kept until the matter is resolved;

• Records of a breach of security safeguards — for at least twenty-four (24) months, as PIPEDA requires;

• Server logs and browser storage — short-lived, as described in section 16.

When information is no longer needed for any purpose, we destroy it securely or de-identify it so that it can no longer be associated with you.

11. Safeguards and Breach Response

We protect personal information with physical, organizational, and technological safeguards proportionate to its sensitivity: encryption of information in transit, access restricted on a need-to-know basis, authentication controls on our systems, access logging, confidentiality undertakings and training for personnel, security review of vendors, and a documented incident-response procedure. No system is perfectly secure and we cannot guarantee absolute security, so please protect your own devices, email account, and credentials.

If a breach of our security safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm to you, PIPEDA requires us to report it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and to notify you as soon as feasible, and to notify any other organization that may be able to reduce the risk. We keep a record of every breach of security safeguards, whether or not it is reportable.

12. Automated Processing and Human Review

Parts of our assessment are automated. Software reads the transaction history from your bank connection to identify your income and its regularity, calculates the maximum we may advance against your net pay, checks the statutory timing rules, and scores the application for fraud risk. An application may be declined automatically where a rule is not met — for example, where the amount requested exceeds half of your net pay for the period, or where the seven-day rule has not yet run.

PIPEDA does not give a general right to human review of an automated decision. We offer one anyway. If your application is declined, you may ask the Privacy Officer to have the decision reviewed by a person, to be told the main information the decision was based on, and to correct information you believe is wrong. There is no charge for that review.

13. Access, Correction, and Your Other Rights

Subject to the limited exceptions PIPEDA allows, you have the right to:

• Be told whether we hold personal information about you, how we have used it, and to whom we have disclosed it;

• Access that information and be given it in a form that is generally understandable;

• Correct information that is inaccurate or incomplete and, where we disagree, have your annotation recorded on the file and passed on to anyone who has access to it;

• Withdraw your consent, as described in section 6;

• Ask for a human review of an automated decision, as described in section 12;

• Complain about our handling of your personal information, as described in section 14.

Send requests in writing to the Privacy Officer using the details in section 3. We respond within thirty (30) days, as PIPEDA requires, and will tell you in advance if we need the limited extension the Act permits. We may ask you to verify your identity before we act, and we use the information given for that verification and for nothing else. Access is free; if a request would involve a genuine cost, we will tell you the amount before doing the work so that you can withdraw or narrow the request.

PIPEDA requires or permits us to refuse access in a few defined situations — for example where giving access would reveal personal information about another person that cannot be severed, where the information is protected by solicitor-client privilege, or where disclosure would compromise an investigation into a breach of an agreement or a contravention of the law. If we refuse, we will tell you in writing why, and tell you how to complain about the refusal.

14. Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal information, or with our response to a request, start with the Privacy Officer (section 3). We will acknowledge your complaint, investigate it, and give you a written answer. If we find the complaint justified, we will correct the practice, including amending this Policy where that is what is needed.

You may also complain, at any time, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada — 1-800-282-1376, www.priv.gc.ca.

A complaint about our conduct as a licensed payday lender — the cost of borrowing, your agreement, cancellation, an extended payment plan, or collection practices — goes instead to the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery, Consumer Services Operations Division, at (416) 326-6203 or CPOLicensing@Ontario.ca.

15. Electronic and Telephone Communications

We send you messages about your application and your loan — status updates, document requests, confirmation of the advance, reminders of your due date, and notices about your account. These are transactional messages: they are part of the Services, and you receive them for as long as you have an application or a loan with us.

Marketing messages are different. We send them only where you have given consent that meets CASL, and:

• you may stop text messages at any time by replying STOP; we send at most one confirmation and then stop marketing texts to that number;

• you may unsubscribe from marketing email using the link in any message, or by writing to support@instant.credit;

• you may ask to be added to our internal do-not-call list by contacting support@instant.credit or (514) 600-0924;

• message and data rates charged by your mobile carrier may apply;

• opting out of marketing does not stop transactional messages about a live application or an outstanding loan.

If a payment is missed, the hours during which we may contact you about it are limited by Ontario Regulation 98/09 — see Part B, section 12 of our Terms and Conditions.

16. Cookies and Website Technologies

The Site is deliberately light on tracking:

• No advertising or profiling trackers. The Site does not load third-party advertising, retargeting, social-media, or behavioural-profiling scripts, and does not use cookies to build a profile of you.

• Local browser storage. The Site stores your display-theme choice (light or dark) in your browser’s local storage. That value stays on your device, is never transmitted to us, and can be cleared at any time through your browser settings.

• Web fonts. The Site loads its typeface from Google Fonts. Your browser requests the font files from Google’s servers, which necessarily receive your IP address; that request is subject to Google’s own privacy policy.

• The application form. The online application is served in a frame from our secure application platform on a separate domain, and it loads only when you choose to start an application. That platform uses the cookies and browser storage strictly necessary to operate your application session.

• Server logs. Our hosting infrastructure keeps standard, short-lived logs (IP address, request, timestamp) for security and reliability.

• Outbound links. The Site offers a WhatsApp link for chat. WhatsApp is operated by a third party; once you leave the Site, that party’s terms and privacy policy apply, and we have no control over what it collects.

If we ever introduce analytics or any technology capable of identifying, locating, or profiling you, we will update this Policy and ask for your consent before switching it on.

17. Minors

The Site and the Services are directed to adults. You must be at least 18 years old and have reached the age of majority in Ontario to apply. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and we do not lend to minors. If you believe a minor has given us personal information, contact the Privacy Officer and we will delete it.

18. Changes to this Policy

We may amend this Policy. When we do, we will post the amended version on the Site and update the “Last updated” date above. Where a change is material, we will bring it to your attention by reasonable means, which may include a notice on the Site or an email to the address we hold for you. The version published on the Site is the version in force.

19. Contact

Instant Credit S.E.C, styled INSTANT.CREDIT S.E.C, acting through its general partner Credit Inc. — licensed payday lender, Ontario licence no. 4741682, expiring 3 September 2027.

• Privacy Officer — privacy@instant.credit · (514) 600-0924

• Licensed office — 2233 Argentia Road, Unit 302, Mississauga, Ontario L5N 2X7

• General inquiries — support@instant.credit

• Regulator — Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery, Consumer Services Operations Division · (416) 326-6203 · CPOLicensing@Ontario.ca