Privacy Policy

1. Person responsible for the protection of personal information

As required by Law 25, Vantage has designated a person responsible for the protection of personal information. Eric White may be reached at info@vantageventures.ca for any question, request, or complaint concerning personal information. This is the single point of contact for access, rectification, and withdrawal requests described in section 9.

2. Personal information we collect

• Identification & professional details — the names, titles, business email addresses, and business phone numbers of your firm's representatives.
• Firm information — firm name, website, office locations, and the mandate profile your firm maintains (industries, geographies, transaction sizes, structure preferences).
• Account & security data — sign-in email, a one-way cryptographic hash of your password (we cannot read your password), multi-factor authentication settings, and sign-in activity.
• Referral & transaction data — introductions routed to your firm, your responses and acknowledgments, deal-progress updates you provide, and related documents you upload.
• Financial & billing data — fees, commissions, and invoices between Vantage and your firm, including billing contact details.
• Correspondence — communications exchanged with Vantage by email or through the portal.
• Portal activity — an audit log of actions taken in the portal (who did what, and when), kept for security and accountability.

We collect this information directly from you and your firm, from your use of the portal, and — for client opportunities — from the clients and referring parties involved in a transaction. We do not collect more than the purposes below require, and the portal uses no advertising or behavioural tracking of any kind.

3. Purposes — why we use it

• Operating the referral network: matching client opportunities against member mandates and facilitating confidential introductions.
• Administering the contractual relationship: referral terms, acknowledgments, fees, commissions, and invoicing.
• Securing the portal: authentication, fraud and abuse prevention, and maintaining the audit log.
• Communicating with your firm about opportunities, deadlines, and network matters.
• Meeting our legal, tax, and regulatory obligations.

We do not sell or rent personal information. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use your information to train artificial-intelligence models.

4. Consent

We collect, use, and disclose personal information with consent — given when your firm joins the network, when you create your account, and when you use the portal — or as otherwise permitted or required by law. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time by contacting the person responsible (section 1). Because the network cannot operate without certain core information, withdrawing consent may mean ending your firm's participation; we will explain the consequences before acting on a withdrawal.

5. How information is shared

Within the referral process. Confidentiality is structural in this network: opportunities are presented as blind profiles, and identities are revealed only step by step. When Vantage proposes your firm to a client (or a client opportunity to your firm), we share only what that stage of the process requires — your firm's name, professional profile, and relevant mandate fit — and only after the acknowledgments the process requires. An introduction is an opportunity to be considered; the client always decides which advisor to engage.

Service providers. We use a small number of carefully selected service providers to run the portal. They process personal information only on our instructions, under contractual confidentiality and security obligations, and only to the extent needed to provide their service. By category:

Other disclosures. We may disclose personal information where the law requires it (for example, to tax authorities or under a court order), or to professional advisors bound by confidentiality, and, in the event of a business transaction involving Vantage, to the parties involved under appropriate safeguards. A current list of our service providers is available from the person responsible on request.

6. Where information is kept — data residency & cross-border transfers

The portal's primary data store — including firm profiles, mandates, referral records, documents, and financial records — is located in Canada (Montréal region). Certain processing (application hosting, email delivery, accounting synchronization) is performed by providers operating in the United States. Before communicating personal information outside Québec, we conducted the assessment Law 25 requires, concluded the information receives adequate protection, and bound each provider to contractual safeguards. You may direct questions about these transfers to the person responsible (section 1).

7. Retention

We keep personal information only as long as necessary for the purposes described above. Our default retention period is 7 years after the end of our relationship with your firm, subject to longer periods where the law requires them (for example, tax, accounting, and transaction records). When retention ends, information is securely deleted or irreversibly anonymized. Anonymized, aggregated statistics (which identify no one) may be retained for network analytics.

8. Technology-assisted matching

The portal computes a transparent mandate-fit score to help route opportunities — it compares an opportunity's industry, geography, and size against the mandate your firm itself provided, and shows its reasoning. Routing decisions are made by a person at Vantage, not automatically by the system. No decision producing legal or significant effects about you is made exclusively by automated means.

9. Your rights

Under Law 25 and PIPEDA, you may, subject to the exceptions the law provides:

• Access — obtain confirmation that we hold personal information about you and receive a copy. In the portal: Settings → Privacy → Download my data.
• Rectification — have inaccurate, incomplete, or ambiguous information corrected. You can edit your firm, contacts, and mandate directly, or ask us.
• Deletion & de-indexing — ask us to delete or anonymize your personal information, or to cease disseminating it.
• Portability — receive computerized personal information you provided to us in a structured, commonly used technological format.
• Withdraw consent — at any time, as described in section 4.

To exercise any of these rights, write to info@vantageventures.ca. We respond within 30 days. If you are unsatisfied with our response, you may lodge a complaint with the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec (CAI) or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC).

10. How we protect it

We apply security measures proportionate to the sensitivity of the information we hold, including: encryption in transit and at rest; strict per-firm data isolation enforced on the server for every request; multi-factor authentication; brute-force sign-in protection; single-use, time-limited sign-in and invitation links; role-based access limited to those who need it; hardened browser security policies; and an immutable audit log of actions in the portal. Passwords are stored only as one-way cryptographic hashes. Security measures are reviewed as the portal evolves.

11. Confidentiality incidents

We maintain a register of confidentiality incidents, as Law 25 requires. If an incident involving your personal information presents a risk of serious injury, we will notify you and the Commission d'accès à l'information promptly, take reasonable measures to reduce the risk of injury, and act to prevent recurrence.

12. Cookies & similar technologies

The portal uses only strictly necessary cookies: they keep you signed in and protect your session (for example, against cross-site request forgery). We use no advertising cookies, no third-party analytics trackers, and no social-media pixels. Because only strictly necessary cookies are used, no cookie-consent banner is required.

13. Third-party sites

The portal and our emails may link to external sites (for example, a client's website). Those sites have their own privacy practices, which we do not control; this policy does not apply to them.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The “last updated” date above reflects the current version. Material changes will be communicated to member firms through the portal or by email before they take effect.

15. Contact

Vantage Ventures Inc. · 18622 rue Lagrange, Montréal, Québec H9K 1R3 · info@vantageventures.ca