Terms of service

01Who we are

Probitas is a service provided by Probitas Research (referred to in these terms as Probitas, we, us or our). Our website is probitas-research.com, and you can reach us at hello@probitas-research.com.

In these terms, you means the person or organisation using the service. If you are agreeing to these terms on behalf of a company, a charity, a firm or any other body, you confirm that you have authority to bind that organisation, and you means that organisation.

02These terms, and your agreement to them

These terms govern your use of the Probitas website and everything you can do through it: screening a name, ordering a company profile, commissioning a full report, buying credits, and reading or sharing what we deliver. By using any part of the service, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree to them, please do not use the service.

Our privacy policy explains how we handle personal data, and forms part of your agreement with us. Where we describe how a particular feature works elsewhere on the site, such as on the pricing page or the sources and methodology page, those descriptions are there to help you and do not override these terms if there is any conflict.

03What the service does

Probitas reads public records and writes you a cited, dated research report on a UK company or charity. There are three things you can do:

• Screen a name. A free check of a person or organisation against global sanctions lists, politically-exposed-person registers and adverse-media signals.
• Order a company profile. A focused summary of an entity drawn from the public registers, priced at one credit.
• Commission a full report. A long-form, footnoted report on a UK company or charity, built live while you watch, priced at two credits.

Every factual claim in what we deliver is tied to a source, and anything we cannot trace to a primary source is left out. We read sources at the moment your check runs, so a report reflects the public record as it stood at that time and not before or after.

04Research, not regulated advice

What we deliver is research into the public record. It is not, and you must not treat it as:

• regulated advice of any kind, whether legal, financial, investment, tax or accounting advice;
• a substitute for the customer due diligence you are required to carry out under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017 or any other law or regulation that applies to you;
• a credit score, a rating, or a prediction that any person or business will or will not default, fail or behave in a particular way;
• a recommendation to enter into, decline, continue or end any relationship, transaction or arrangement.

The risk indicators and verdicts in a report are a summary of probity signals drawn from public filings. They are our considered read of the evidence, not a guarantee about anyone. Any decision you take after reading a Probitas report remains yours, taken on your own judgement and, where appropriate, with your own professional advisers. If you are a regulated firm, you remain responsible for your own compliance obligations.

05Eligibility and your account

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract to use Probitas. You do not need an account to buy credits or run most checks; you can pay by card and use the credit code we issue you. If you choose to sign in with Google, you are responsible for keeping access to that account, and for everything done under your sign-in.

Keep your credit code and any sign-in details confidential. If you believe someone has used them without your permission, tell us at hello@probitas-research.com as soon as you can.

06Credits, payment and refunds

Paid checks are bought with credits. Prices are shown on the pricing page and are in pounds sterling. The price you see at checkout is the price you pay, including any tax that applies.

1. How credits work. A name screen is free. A company profile costs one credit and a full report costs two credits. One balance covers all three.
2. No subscription, no expiry. Credits are bought once, not on a recurring plan, and they do not expire. There is no monthly minimum.
3. Payment. Card payments are handled by our payment processor, Stripe. We do not see or store your full card details. Your purchase is also subject to the payment processor's own terms.
4. Your right to cancel. Because each check is a digital service we begin to perform straight away, you agree that we may start work as soon as you run a check, and you accept that you lose any statutory right to cancel once a check has been delivered. Credits you have bought but not yet spent can be refunded on request within 14 days of purchase.
5. If something goes wrong. If a delivered report contains a confirmed factual error, reply to the delivery email and we will re-run the check at no charge. Nothing in these terms affects your legal rights as a consumer, which we do not seek to exclude.

07Acceptable use

You agree to use Probitas lawfully and fairly. In particular, you must not:

• use the service, or any report, for an unlawful purpose, including harassment, stalking, discrimination or to make a decision the law forbids;
• use Probitas as your sole basis for a decision that the law requires you to support with regulated due diligence;
• resell, redistribute or republish reports as a screening database, a feed or a product of your own, or otherwise pass off our work as something other than research we prepared;
• copy, scrape, or systematically extract the service, or attempt to rebuild it, by automated means or otherwise;
• probe, interfere with or try to break the security of the service, or get around any limit, gate or rate control we put in place;
• submit anyone else's personal data to the service unless you have a lawful basis to do so.

If you break these rules, we may suspend or end your access, and we may keep a record of the breach where we are entitled to.

08Accuracy, sources and corrections

We take care to read the public record faithfully and to cite it honestly. The records themselves are not ours, though. They can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong at source, and a register may be unavailable or may change after we read it. We cannot warrant that every fact in the public record is correct, only that we have reported what the record said, when we read it, and where it came from.

Where the evidence is thin, a report says so rather than guessing. When you flag a confirmed error, we record it on our public corrections log with a date and a note of what changed. We would rather you see our mistakes than wonder whether we make any.

09Reports, ownership and your licence

We own the Probitas name, our software, our method, the way our reports are written and laid out, and the site itself. The underlying facts in a report come from public records and are not ours to own.

When you pay for a report, we give you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to use, store, print and share that report for your own purposes, including in a board pack, a client file or a regulator's hands. That licence does not let you sell the report on as a product, strip out our attribution, or use our name or marks to suggest we endorse you or your decision.

10Third-party sources and links

Probitas reads and links to records published by others, among them Companies House, the Charity Commission, the FCA register, OFSI, OFAC and UN sanctions lists, courts and tribunals, and the press. Those sources are run by their own operators under their own terms. We are not responsible for their content, their availability, or anything you do once you follow a link to them.

11Availability and changes to the service

We work to keep Probitas available and working well, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or free of faults. We may need to suspend, withdraw or change parts of the service to maintain it, to improve it, or because a source we rely on has changed. Where a change is significant and affects you, we will give you reasonable notice if we can.

12Disclaimers

We provide the service and our reports with reasonable care and skill. Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, we exclude all other warranties, conditions and terms that might otherwise apply, whether written down or implied. In particular, we do not warrant that a report is complete, that it will meet a regulatory standard set for you, or that it is fit for a particular purpose you have in mind unless we have agreed that purpose with you in writing.

13Our liability to you

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability where it would be unlawful to do so. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and for anything else that cannot be limited under the law that applies.

Subject to that paragraph:

• we are not liable for any loss of profit, loss of business, loss of an opportunity, loss of goodwill, or any indirect or consequential loss, however it arises;
• we are not liable for a decision you take, or do not take, after reading a report, since that decision is yours;
• our total liability to you for all claims connected with the service, whether in contract, in negligence or otherwise, is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred pounds.

If you are using Probitas in the course of a business, you accept that this allocation of risk is reasonable given the price of the service and its nature as research rather than advice.

14Your responsibility to us

If you use Probitas in the course of a business, you agree to cover us for any loss, claim or cost we reasonably incur because you have broken these terms, used a report unlawfully, or submitted someone else's data to the service without a lawful basis. This does not apply to your use of Probitas as a consumer.

15Your data

How we handle personal data is set out in our privacy policy. In short: we host on UK servers, a report and the search that produced it are kept for 90 days so your shared link keeps working, and after that they are deleted.

16Governing law and disputes

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of the service, are governed by the law of England and Wales. The courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction, except that if you are a consumer living elsewhere in the United Kingdom, you may also bring proceedings in your own home courts.

If you are unhappy with anything, please tell us first at hello@probitas-research.com. We would always rather put a problem right than argue about it.

17General terms

• The whole agreement. These terms and our privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the service, and replace anything said or written before.
• If part fails. If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a right straight away, that is not a waiver of it; we can still enforce it later.
• Transfer. You may not transfer your rights under these terms without our agreement. We may transfer ours, for example if our business is sold, and we will tell you if we do.
• No third parties. No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.
• Events outside our control. We are not responsible for a failure to perform caused by something genuinely beyond our reasonable control.

18Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time, for example to reflect a change in the law or in how the service works. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top of this page, and where a change materially affects your rights we will take reasonable steps to bring it to your attention. Continuing to use Probitas after a change means you accept the updated terms.

19How to reach us

If anything here is unclear, or you want to talk to a person about it, we would be glad to hear from you.