Privacy note.

Frank is a funding guide for South African businesses and a trading name of Meet Frank (Pty) Ltd (registration number 2025/917033/07). Frank is also the character who walks you through the flow on-site.

For the purposes of the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA), Meet Frank (Pty) Ltd is the responsible party for the personal information described here. A lender you ask us to introduce you to becomes a separate responsible party for the information it receives, and handles it under its own privacy policy.

Neither Frank nor Meet Frank (Pty) Ltd is a registered financial services provider, and we are not a lender. What that means in practice is set out in our terms of use.

• Data queries and requests: lynetteduplessis@meetfrank.ai
• Information Officer: Lynette du Plessis
• Address: 42 Plein Street, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, 7600

Five buckets:

• Answers you give Frank during the funding check (years trading, turnover, industry, reason for funding, amount, and so on). We use these to work out which products fit and to show you why the others do not.
• A record of the results Frank showed you. Each time the sign-up screen or the results page shows you something new, we store the answers you gave and the options you were shown, with the date. It is linked to your account once you have one, and before that to a random id kept in your browser. We use it to answer questions about what you were shown and to check that the matching works as it should.
• Contact details you choose to share (name, email, phone and any message) when you apply with a lender or ask for a follow-up. We use these to introduce you to the lender you picked, or so a consultant can reply to you.
• Account details, when you create an account, which is what shows you the names of the lenders your answers match: your name, your email address and your password, or, where you sign in with Google, the basic profile Google returns. Passwords are stored only in hashed form by our authentication provider, and we never see your Google password.
• Technical and usage data: your device type, browser, approximate location from your IP address, and which pages you visited. Analytics of this kind only run if you accept cookies.

We do not ask for and do not want your ID number, bank statements, card details or account credentials. A lender may ask for those directly — give them to the lender, never to us.

POPIA requires a justification for each use. Ours are:

• Your consent, for sending your details to a lender and for analytics cookies. You give it deliberately, per lender, and you can withdraw it at any time.
• Performing what you asked for, for running the funding check and replying to you.
• Our legitimate interests, for keeping the site secure, preventing fraudulent and bot submissions, and improving how the check works.
• Legal obligation, where a law or a regulator requires us to keep or produce a record.

Giving us your information is voluntary. You can browse the site and run the funding check without it. Without an account we cannot show you the names of the lenders you match, and without your contact details we cannot introduce you to a lender.

Cookies that are strictly necessary to make the site work — keeping you signed in, remembering your place in the flow, recording your cookie choice — are always set.

If you accept in the cookie banner, we also load Google Analytics 4 to see which pages are visited, on what devices, and roughly from where. We anonymise IP addresses and do not link analytics to your contact details. If you decline, Google Analytics does not load at all.

You can change your mind at any time through the “Cookie preferences” link in the footer.

• Frank’s team — that is Lynette, and whoever she explicitly brings in, under a duty of confidentiality.
• Lenders — only the lender you explicitly ask us to introduce you to, and only the fields that lender needs to assess the introduction. We do not broadcast your details to the panel, and nothing goes to any lender until you ask.
• Our service providers, who process data on our instructions as POPIA operators: Supabase (database, hosted in the EU), Render (web hosting), Resend (email delivery), Google Analytics (site analytics, only with your consent) and Sentry (error monitoring).
• Authorities, where the law requires it, or where we need to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with data brokers, and we do not pass it to lenders you did not choose.

Some of the providers above process data outside South Africa — Supabase in the European Union, and Render, Resend, Google and Sentry largely in the United States and the EU. POPIA allows this where the recipient is bound by rules that protect the information in a way that is substantially similar to POPIA, or where you consent.

We rely on the data-processing agreements we have with each of these providers, which impose those protections contractually. You can ask us for the current list at lynetteduplessis@meetfrank.ai.

POPIA does not allow us to keep personal information for longer than we need it, so we work to a schedule rather than keeping things indefinitely:

• Submissions, funding-check answers and the record of results shown: 5 years from your last contact with us. Introductions can take months to conclude, and a referral fee can be queried long afterwards.
• Account data: for as long as your account is open, and 12 months after you close it.
• Support emails: 3 years from the end of the conversation.
• Analytics: 14 months, Google Analytics’ own retention window.

After that we delete it, or anonymise it so it can no longer identify you. You can ask us to delete it sooner — see below.

We keep your information encrypted in transit and at rest, restrict database access to the people and services that need it, and use row-level security so one submission cannot read another. Accounts are authenticated through a managed provider rather than passwords we store ourselves.

No system is perfectly secure. If personal information is accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person, POPIA requires us to notify the Information Regulator (South Africa) and, where the breach is likely to affect you, to notify you as soon as reasonably possible. We will.

We send you service messages — confirming a submission, passing on a lender’s reply — because you asked us to introduce you. We only send marketing email or SMS if you have opted in. Every marketing message carries an unsubscribe link, and you can opt out at any time, at no cost, by using it or by emailing support@meetfrank.ai.

Under POPIA you have the right to:

• ask what personal information we hold about you, and get a copy;
• have information that is wrong or incomplete corrected;
• have information deleted where we no longer have grounds to keep it;
• object to processing we base on legitimate interests;
• withdraw a consent you gave us, at any time;
• object to direct marketing, and to unsolicited electronic marketing;
• complain to the Information Regulator.

Email lynetteduplessis@meetfrank.ai and we will respond within 30 days. There is no charge for a request, unless it is repetitive or excessive, in which case we will tell you the fee before doing the work.

Withdrawing consent does not undo what was already lawfully done with your information — notably, we cannot retrieve details a lender has already received. You would need to ask that lender directly.

Start with us at lynetteduplessis@meetfrank.ai. If we do not resolve it, you can complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) at POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za, using the Regulator’s own complaint form. Complaints about a lender or a credit agreement go elsewhere — see clause 16 of our terms.

We will update the “last updated” date at the top if anything material changes, and flag significant changes on the site. Nothing is applied retrospectively: if something changes for the worse, information we already hold keeps being handled under the rules that applied when you gave it to us.