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Marketing services and your data

Updated: 7 September 2026

Introduction

Our marketing services use data to help our clients find and better understand customers. This helps ensure people receive marketing for products and services that are more relevant to them.

On this page you can find out how we use data to help our clients with their marketing activities. It explains:

  • what types of marketing services we offer;
  • what data we use and how we use it; and
  • how to opt out of these activities.

More detail can be found in our Marketing Services Privacy Notice if you need it.

In summary

  • We provide clients with names and addresses from the open register for postal marketing purposes.
  • We use a range of different data to categorise households and postcodes into groups, and supply those categories to clients for marketing purposes.
  • We supply clients with data from third parties about residential properties and whether they are available for sale or to let.
  • We use credit reference data to create flags which help clients who are running marketing campaigns to exclude individuals who may be financially vulnerable or unlikely to be eligible for a credit product.
  • We don't use credit reference data (other than the open register) to provide clients with new names or addresses for marketing purposes.
  • We don't provide clients with financial information about individuals for marketing purposes.

Opting out

Opting out of our marketing services is simple. If you would prefer that TransUnion doesn't use your personal data in the ways described below, you can contact us at ukconsumer@transunion.com and ask to opt out of our marketing services. You can also see our Consumer Enquiries page for more information.

If you opt out, we will:

  • add your name to our marketing suppression list;
  • remove your name and address from the copy of the open register that we supply to clients for marketing purposes (or flag it as not to be used for marketing in cases where we are supplying the data for multiple purposes); and
  • not use your personal data when building or updating our CAMEO product.

Please be aware that it may take up to 30 days to process any opt out request.

Our marketing products

The Standalone open register consists of names and addresses of people who have registered to vote in the UK and have not opted out of the open register.

The open register can be bought from local authorities by anyone and used for any purpose, including direct marketing. We obtain it from local authorities and then supply it to our clients. Our clients can use it to send advertising to people through the post.

If you want to opt out of the open register at source (so that your local authority stops supplying your name and address to all businesses, including TransUnion), please see here.  If you just want to opt out of TransUnion's copy of the open register, please see "Opting out" above.

What we do and don't do with this data

We do...

  • obtain the open register from local authorities and supply it to our clients for postal advertising

We don't...

  • use credit reference data to provide clients with information about people's financial status for marketing purposes

Our CAMEO UK datasets categorise and describe the likely characteristics of groups of households or postcodes and the people who live there. Group and categorising geographical areas and people in this way is sometimes called "segmentation".

CAMEO contains modelled data, which means it is inferred or estimated based on other information we hold such as the areas in which people live. For example, CAMEO data can be based on estimates of the average age, income, wealth and education level of the residents of an area, how rural or urban the area is, and what sort of properties there are there.

Our CAMEO data is available at two levels:

  • Postcode level: Where CAMEO is held at postcode level, we do not consider it to be personal data because it only describes the likely characteristics of a population across entire postcodes. It does not identify individuals or distinguish between them.
  • Household level: Where CAMEO is held at household level it has the potential to  be personal data depending on how many people are in a particular household. Because we do not know at any point in time how many people are living in a household, we treat the entire CAMEO household level dataset as personal data as a precaution.

In either case, where CAMEO data is associated with a specific individual's name and address and used to make decisions affecting that individual, it is that person's personal data.

We supply CAMEO UK to our clients for a range of different purposes. For example, clients might use it to help understand the likely characteristics of their customers, or to decide the geographical areas on which to focus their marketing activity, depending on the types of product they sell.

Similar datasets are also available for other countries.

What we do and don't do with this data

We do...

  • use non-personal datasets from third parties to help build our CAMEO products, including via statistical analysis, modelling and profiling, to help clients target their advertising and make it more relevant to individuals;
  • use credit reference data (but not any financial information) for statistical analysis, modelling and profiling to work out average ages and numbers of adults per household to help build our CAMEO product; and
  • supply CAMEO data to clients to help them better understand their customer base and to help target their marketing at appropriate groups of customers.

We don't...

  • include any individual's financial credit reference data as part of CAMEO.

Pre-Screen helps our clients market financial products, such as loans and credit cards, more responsibly. It does this by identifying individuals on their marketing lists who are unlikely to be eligible for the product or who may struggle with repayments.

Clients provide us with a list of individuals, which we compare against credit reference data we hold. We flag individuals showing signs of financial difficulty, ensuring that marketing efforts are not directed at those people who may be financially vulnerable. Importantly, we do not share any financial data with our clients as part of this service.

By using credit data to exclude individuals unlikely to meet our clients’ lending criteria, Pre-Screen supports responsible lending and helps protect consumers from receiving marketing for unsuitable credit products.

What we do and don’t do with this data…

We do…

  • use credit reference data to identify individuals who shouldn’t be sent marketing for credit products that are likely to be unsuitable for their financial circumstances.

We don’t…

  • share any financial data about individuals with our clients; and
  • prevent any individual from applying for a particular credit product.

Our Property data provides a list of residential addresses together with information about the properties. For example, the data can indicate whether the property is a flat, a terraced house, a semi-detached house or a detached house, whether it has a garden and what council tax band applies to it. The data doesn't contain information about who lives in the property.dsklsdlsdllsdg

Our Homemover data provides a list of residential addresses together with information about the sale and rental status of those properties. For example, the data can indicate whether a property is for sale or available to let. Again, it doesn't contain information about who lives in the property.

We supply this data to clients to help them decide which properties they should send marketing to, and when. For example, a company selling conservatories could use the data to help send its marketing to houses with gardens, rather than to flats. Or a utility or home insurance company may use the data to help send its marketing to properties where people have recently moved in.

In some cases, we use these datasets in combination with each other to help meet a client's specific requirements. For example, a client may provide us with a list of postcodes for its existing customers, and ask us to find addresses which may have similar people living there. We can use CAMEO to find postcodes where we estimate similar people might live, and Property data to produce a list of addresses in those postcodes. The client can send postal marketing to those addresses.

What we do and don't do with this data

We do...

  • use property-level data from third parties to provide information to our clients for their marketing purposes.

We don't...

  • use credit reference data to provide clients with information about an individual's financial status for marketing purposes

We use a minimal amount of the data we hold as a credit reference agency for modelling, statistical analysis and profiling.  We can provide this data, anonymised and aggregated, to our clients for a variety of use cases, including to inform or improve their marketing activities.  This may be by providing segmentation or analysis of geographical areas to show the financial strength or resilience of the area which can inform the types of client marketing services which are directed to the region.

What we do and don't do with this data

We do...

  • use aggregated, postcode-level data to provide general information about a geographical area to our clients for their marketing purposes.

We don't...

  • use credit reference data to provide clients with information about an individual's financial status for marketing purposes.

More information

If you would like to see more information about our marketing services and the data that we use, please visit our Marketing Services Privacy Notice. This also provides information about your rights over the personal data we hold about you, including the ability to opt out of marketing services, and how to contact us if you want to exercise those rights.