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By accessing this website, you, as a client or potential client, accept to receive information on this website in more than one language.

An individual investor, also known as a retail client, is a client organisation or individual who cannot meet both (i) one or more of the professional client criteria laid down in Annex II to the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Directive 2004/39/EC), and (ii) one or more of the qualified investor criteria set out in Article 2 of the Prospectus Directive (Directive 2003/71/EC).

Terms and conditions

Please read this page before proceeding, as it explains certain restrictions imposed by law on the distribution of this information and the countries in which our funds are authorised for sale. It is your responsibility to be aware of and to observe all applicable laws and regulations of any relevant jurisdiction.

Please note that you are required to read and accept the terms of our Privacy Policy before you are able to access our websites.

Once you have confirmed that you agree to the legal information in this document, and the Privacy Policy – by indicating your consent above – we will place a cookie on your computer to recognise you and prevent this page reappearing should you access this site, or other BlackRock sites, on future occasions.  The cookie will expire after six months, or sooner should there be a material change to this important information.

By confirming that you have read this important information, you also:
(i) Agree that such information will apply to any subsequent access to the Individual investors (or Institutions / Intermediaries) section of this website by you, and that all such subsequent access will be subject to the disclaimers, risk warnings and other information set out herein; and
(ii) Warrant that no other person will access the Individual investors section of this website from the same computer and logon as you are currently using.

The BlackRock authorised unit trusts are funds authorised under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and are generally available for investment by the public in the UK.

The offshore funds described in the following pages are administered and managed by companies within the BlackRock Group and can be marketed in certain jurisdictions only. It is your responsibility to be aware of the applicable laws and regulations of your country of residence. Further information is available in the Prospectus or other constitutional document for each fund. Please note that only some of the offshore funds seek distributor status in the UK.

The BlackRock Pensions Funds are available through the products of BlackRock Life Limited (authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority). They are available only to trustees and members of pension schemes registered under Part IV of the Finance Act 2004 via an insurance policy which would be issued either by BlackRock Life Limited, or by another insurer of such business.

This does not constitute an offer or solicitation to sell shares in any of the funds referred to on this site, by anyone in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or distribution would be unlawful or in which the person making such offer or solicitation is not qualified to do so or to anyone to whom it is unlawful to make such offer or solicitation.

Specifically, the funds described are not available for distribution to or investment by US investors. The units/shares will not be registered under the US Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act") and, except in a transaction which does not violate the Securities Act or any other applicable US securities laws (including without limitation any applicable law of any of the States of the USA) may not be directly or indirectly offered or sold in the USA or any of its territories or possessions or areas subject to its jurisdiction or to or for the benefit of a US Person.

The funds described have not been, nor will they be, qualified for distribution to the public in Canada as no prospectus for these funds has been filed with any securities commission or regulatory authority in Canada or any province or territory thereof. This website is not, and under no circumstances is to be construed, as an advertisement or any other step in furtherance of a public offering of shares in Canada. No person resident in Canada for the purposes of the Income Tax Act (Canada) may purchase or accept a transfer of shares in the funds described unless he or she is eligible to do so under applicable Canadian or provincial laws.

Applications to invest in any fund referred to on this site, must only be made on the basis of the offer document relating to the specific investment (e.g. prospectus, simplified prospectus, key investor information document or other applicable terms and conditions).

As a result of money laundering regulations, additional documentation for identification purposes may be required when you make your investment. Details are contained in the relevant Prospectus or other constitutional document.

If you are unsure about the meaning of any information provided please consult your financial or other professional adviser.

The information contained on this site is subject to copyright with all rights reserved. It must not be reproduced, copied or redistributed in whole or in part.

The information contained on this site is published in good faith but no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited or by any person as to its accuracy or completeness and it should not be relied on as such. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited shall have no liability, save for any liability that BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited may have under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (or the name of any replacement legislation if the legislation permits such a statement to be made), for any loss or damage arising out of the use or reliance on the information provided including without limitation, any loss of profit or any other damage, direct or consequential. No information on this site constitutes investment, tax, legal or any other advice.

Where a claim is brought against BlackRock by a third party in relation to your use of this website, you hereby agree to fully reimburse BlackRock for all losses, costs, actions, proceedings, claims, damages, expenses (including reasonable legal costs and expenses), or liabilities, whatsoever suffered or incurred directly by BlackRock as a consequence of improper use of this website.  Neither party should be liable to the other for any loss or damage which may be suffered by the other party due to any cause beyond the first party's reasonable control including without limitation any power failure.
You acknowledge and agree that it is your responsibility to keep secure and confidential any passwords that we issue to you and your authorised employees and not to let such password(s) become public knowledge. If any password(s) become known by someone other than you and your authorised employees, you must change those particular password(s) immediately using the function available for this purpose on the Website.

You may leave the BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited website when you access certain links on this website. In so doing, you may be proceeding to the site of an organisation that is not regulated under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited has not examined any of these websites and does not assume any responsibility for the contents of such websites nor the services, products or items offered through such websites.

BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited shall have no liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to, any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the services provided herein.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
The value of investments and the income from them may go down as well as up and are not guaranteed.
You may not get back the amount you invested.
Any favourable tax treatment of a product (including but not limited to ISAs) is subject to government legislation and as such may not be maintained.
The levels and bases of, and reliefs from, taxation changed in the last Budget and may change in the future.
Rates of exchange may cause the value of investments to go up or down.
Fluctuation may be particularly marked in the case of a higher volatility fund and the value of an investment may fall suddenly and substantially.
For your protection, telephone calls are usually recorded.

Please note that while some of the BlackRock funds are "ring-fenced", others form part of a single company and are not. For BlackRock funds that do not have segregated liability status, in the event of a single BlackRock fund being unable to meet liabilities attributable to that BlackRock fund out of the assets attributable to it, the excess may be met out of the assets attributable to the other BlackRock funds within the same company. We refer you to the prospectus or other relevant terms and conditions of each BlackRock fund for further information in this regard.

The BlackRock unit trusts are managed by BlackRock Fund Managers Limited (authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and a member of the Investment Management Association) which is the unit trust management affiliate of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited.

The BlackRock ISA are managed by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited (authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority).

Companies within the BlackRock Group which do not carry out investment business in the UK are not subject to the provisions of the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Accordingly, investors entering into investment agreements with such companies will not have the protection afforded by that Act or the rules and regulations made under it, including the UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of BlackRock as a whole or any part thereof, nor do they constitute investment or any other advice.

Any research found on these pages has been procured and may have been acted on by BlackRock for its own purposes.

This site is operated and issued by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (Register number 119293). You can gain access to the FCA's rules and guidance notes from the following link: http://www.fca.org.uk. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited is a company registered in England, No. 2020394. Registered Office: 12 Throgmorton Avenue, London EC2N 2DL. BlackRock is a trading name of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited. VAT No GB 888 4204 87. General enquiries about this website should be sent to EMEAwebmaster@blackrock.com. This email address should not be used for any enquiries relating to investments.

Important Information

An S&P Capital IQ fund grading represents an opinion only and should not be relied on when making an investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Currency exchange rates may affect the value of investments. Copyright © 2014 by McGraw-Hill international (UK) Limited (S&P), a subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2014 Morningstar. All Rights Reserved. The information, data, analyses, and opinions contained herein (1) include the proprietary information of Morningstar, (2) may not be copied or redistributed, (3) do not constitute investment advice offered by Morningstar, (4) are provided solely for informational purposes and therefore are not an offer to buy or sell a security, and (5) are not warranted to be correct, complete, or accurate. Morningstar shall not be responsible for any trading decisions, damages, or other losses resulting from, or related to, this information, data, analyses, or opinions or their use. The Morningstar Analyst Rating™ is subjective in nature and reflects Morningstar’s current expectations of future events/behaviour as they relate to a particular fund. Because such events/behaviour may turn out to be different than expected, Morningstar does not guarantee that a fund will perform in line with its Morningstar Analyst Rating. Likewise, the Morningstar Analyst Rating should not be seen as any sort of guarantee or assessment of the creditworthiness of a fund or of its underlying securities and should not be used as the sole basis for making any investment decision.

Privacy policy

Last revised: May 11 2018

Summary

This Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand what information we gather about you, what we use that information for, and with whom we share that information. It also sets out your rights in relation to your information and whom you may contact for more information or queries. Click on the links below to take you to the more detailed sections of this Privacy Policy:

• To whom this privacy statement applies and what it covers
• About other areas of blackrock.com and ishares.com
• What information we collect 
• How we use information about you 
• The legal grounds we rely on for processing personal information 
• To whom we disclose your information 
• Protection of your personal information 
• How long we keep your information for 
• Your rights and how to contact us 
• Changes to this privacy statement

To whom this privacy policy applies and what it covers

This privacy policy applies to each member of BlackRock’s group of companies (the “BlackRock Group”) and the entities we own or control (“BlackRock” or “we”, “us” or “our”). For more details on each of us (including our names, registered office addresses and contact details), please click here.  

BlackRock recognizes the importance of protecting your personal and financial information and is committed to doing this. This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, handle, store and protect information about you when:

• we provide products or services to you or our client;
• you visit or use our Website; and/or
• performing any other activities that form part of our business.

When we refer to “our Website” or “this Website” in this Privacy Policy, we mean the specific webpages of blackrock.com or ishares.com, and to specific webpages with a URL that begin with or contain blackrock.com/… or ishares.com/… .

BlackRock.com and iShares.com are comprised of various global, country or regional websites, each of which is provided by BlackRock.

This Privacy Policy also contains information about when we share your personal information with other members of the BlackRock Group and other third parties (for example, our service providers).

In this Privacy Policy, we may sometimes collectively refer to handling, collecting, protecting and storing your personal information as “processing” such personal information.

Other websites

Please note that other websites that may be linked to by this Website are not governed by this Privacy Policy. We encourage visitors to review the privacy policy on each of these other websites before disclosing any personal information.

What information we collect

In the course of providing products or services to you or our client and performing due diligence checks in connection with our products or services (or discussing the possible products or services we might provide), we generally collect personal information about you. We also typically collect personal information about you when you visit or use our Website.

We typically collect or obtain your personal information because you give it to us (for example, in a form on our Website) or because other people give that information to us (for example, third party service providers that we use to help operate our Website or your employer where it receives products or services from BlackRock). We may also collect or obtain personal information from you because we observe or infer that information about you from the way you interact with us. For example, if you use our risk management platform, Aladdin, we will generally collect information about you in order to communicate updates to Aladdin functionality and general information about Aladdin. In order to improve your experience when you use this Website and to ensure that it is functioning effectively, we (or our service providers) also use cookies (small text files stored in a user’s browser) and web beacons (small graphic images that are placed on a website and used to monitor a user’s interaction with that website) which may collect personal information.

Additional information on how we use cookies and other tracking technologies and how you can control these can be found in our Cookies Policy, which is included at the end of this document.

The personal information that we may collect depends on the specific services, activities or products we undertake but typically includes: your name; age; date of birth; gender; home address; email address; telephone number; other contact details; country of residence; passport number and other national ID numbers; employment details (for example, the organization you work for, your job title); family circumstances (for example, your marital status where you enter it in a form on our Website or it appears in any documentation you provide to us); financial and tax related information (for example, your income, assets and tax residency where you enter such information in a form on our Website or it appears in any documentation that you provide to us); details of how you use any product or service provided by BlackRock; postings on any blogs, forums, wikis, and any other social media applications and services that we provide; IP address; browser and device type; user name that is used by you for one of our products or services; language; access times and duration; details of how you like to use our Website or the interactive products, tools, other technology or services we provide to you or our clients; websites that you visited before and after visiting our Website; details of how you like to interact with us, and similar information.

The types of personal information and ‘sensitive’ or ‘special categories’ of personal information that we collect will generally vary depending on the nature of the products and services that we provide to you and how you use our Website. In some cases, the ‘sensitive’ or ‘special categories’ of personal information that we collect include: your dietary requirements (for example, where we would like to provide you with lunch during a meeting); your health (for example, so that we can make reasonable accommodations for you in our buildings); your sexual orientation (for example, if you provide us with details of your spouse or partner); and any criminal convictions that you may have (for example, if this information is collected as part of ‘know your client’ and anti-money laundering checks that we must conduct before accepting you or your employer as a client).

In some rare circumstances, we will also gather other ‘special categories’ of personal information about you because you volunteer that data to us (for example, it appears in a copy of your resume/CV that you upload to our Website). In some other circumstances, the personal information we collect from you is needed to meet our legal or regulatory obligations or to provide you with the products or services requested by you or our client (who may be your employer). If so, we will indicate to you that the provision of this information is mandatory, and the consequences if we cannot collect this information.

In some cases, we will also collect personal information about you indirectly from third parties such as: (i) your employer where we provide it with products or services; (ii) third parties such as providers of ‘know your client’ and anti-money laundering services which we sometimes use to help us meet our legal requirements in this area and to help us verify your identity where we provide you or your employer with products or services; (iii) intermediaries (such as independent financial advisers); (iv) background check providers which we sometimes use to verify your identity when you apply for a job through our Website; (v) third party service providers that help us to operate our Website; and (vi) from publicly available sources such as business and employment oriented social networking services and jobs boards.

How we use information about you

Use of personal information to provide products and services

We will use your personal information to provide you or our client with products or services. As part of this, we may use your personal information in the course of correspondence relating to those products or services. Such correspondence may be with you, our client, other members of the BlackRock Group, our service providers or public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation.

In many cases, we also use your personal information to conduct due diligence checks in advance of providing products or services to you or our client, and to process an application from you or a prospective client to receive products or services from us. If you are referred to us by an intermediary or similar third party, we also typically use your personal information to assess whether to accept or reject your referral to BlackRock by that intermediary or similar third party.

Because we provide a wide range of products and services to our clients, the way in which we use personal information in relation to our products and services varies. For example, we use personal information about you when:

• you use our risk management platform, Aladdin
• we provide you or your employer with an insurance product or service
• you or your employer engage us to provide investment management or similar services 
• you privately invest in a fund product managed by a member of the BlackRock Group
• you engage a member of the BlackRock Group to provide investment management services
• you provide us with your personal information via email or a web form.

Use of personal information collected via our Website
We generally use your personal information collected via this Website:

• to manage and improve any services provided via our Website
• to manage and improve our Website (including by drawing up statistics on the usage of our Website)
• to tailor content of our Website to provide you with a more personalised experience and draw your attention to information about products and services that may be of interest to you
• to manage and respond to any request that you submit through our Website
• to help us learn more about you, the products and services that you or your employer receive from BlackRock, and other products and services that you or your employer might be interested in receiving
• to correspond with you in relation to services you use on our Website or information you provide via our Website. This correspondence is usually with you, other members of the BlackRock Group, our service providers, or public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation.

Use of personal information for other activities that form part of the operation of our business

We generally also use your personal information collected via this Website for the purposes of, or in connection with:
• applicable legal or regulatory requirements
• requests and communications from public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation
• financial accounting, invoicing and risk analysis purposes
• prudent operational management (including credit and risk management, insurance, audit, training and similar administrative purposes)
• client relationship purposes, which involve: (i) sending you BlackRock thought leadership or details of BlackRock products and services that we think might be of interest to you or your employer; (ii) contacting you to receive feedback on BlackRock products or services; and (iii) contacting you for other marketing or research purposes
• recruitment and business development purposes
• services we receive from our professional advisors, such as lawyers, accountants and consultants
• arrangements we have in place with intermediaries, brokers and other individuals and entities that partner with us
• considering, and entering into, any transaction involving part or all of the business or assets of the BlackRock Group
• protecting our rights and those of our clients
• meeting our corporate and social responsibilities.

The legal grounds we rely on for processing personal information

We are required by law to set out in this Privacy Policy the legal grounds on which we rely in order to process your personal information.

We generally use your personal information for the purposes outlined above because: (a) it is necessary for our legitimate interests and does not unduly affect your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms (see below); (b) it is necessary for legal and/or regulatory obligations or requests that we are subject to, such as keeping records for tax purposes or providing information to a public body or law enforcement agency; (c) it is necessary to perform contractual obligations that we owe towards you or our client, or to take pre-contractual steps at the request of you or our client; (d) it is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest (such as assisting with diversity in the workplace where you make contact through our Website in relation to job opportunities at BlackRock); or (e) in some cases, we have obtained your prior consent.

Examples of the ‘legitimate interests’ referenced above are: (i) to benefit from cost-effective services (for example, we may opt to use certain IT platforms offered by our service providers); (ii) to assess and verify any job application that you submit through the Website; (iii) to prevent fraud or criminal activity, misuses of our products and services, as well as the security of our IT systems, architecture and networks; (iv) to exercise our rights under Articles 16 and 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, including our freedom to conduct a business and right to property; and (v) to meet our corporate and social responsibility objectives.

To the extent that we process any sensitive personal information relating to you for any of the purposes outlined above, we will do so because either: (1) you have given us your explicit consent to process that information; (2) the processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest on the basis of applicable law (for example where we are required by law or regulatory requirements to process that information in order to ensure we meet our ‘know your client’ and ‘anti money laundering’ obligations); (3) the processing is necessary to carry out our obligations under employment, social security or social protection law; or (4) the processing is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims. The legal grounds for processing sensitive personal information outlined above at (1) to (4) appear at Articles 9(2)(a), 9(2)(g), 9(2)(b) and 9(2)(f) of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation respectively.

Where we are legally required to obtain your explicit consent to provide you with certain marketing materials, we will only provide you with such marketing materials where we have obtained such consent from you.

If you do not want to continue receiving any marketing materials from us, you can click on the unsubscribe function in the communication or e-mail groupprivacy@blackrock.com at any time.

To whom we disclose your information

In connection with one or more of the purposes outlined in the “How we use information about you” section above, we generally disclose details about you to: other members of the BlackRock Group; professional advisors and third parties that provide services to us and/or other members of the BlackRock Group (such as IT systems providers, platform providers, financial advisors, consultants (including lawyers and accountants), providers of HR and recruitment services and other goods and services providers (such as providers of marketing services where we are permitted to disclose your personal information to them); intermediaries, brokers, and other individuals and entities that partner with us; competent authorities (including any national and/or international regulatory or enforcement body or court or other form of tribunal, where we (or any other member of the BlackRock Group) are required to do so by applicable law or regulation at their request); a potential buyer, transferee, merger partner or seller and their advisers in connection with an actual or potential transfer or merger of part or all of BlackRock’s business or assets, or any associated rights or interests, or to acquire a business or enter into a merger with it; credit reference agencies or other organizations that help us detect criminal activity and incidence of fraud; and any central or local government department and other statutory or public bodies.

If you are an individual in the European Union, please note that some of the recipients of your personal information referenced above will be based in countries outside of the European Union whose laws may not provide the same level of data protection. Those countries typically include: the United States, Canada, Singapore, and India. In such cases, BlackRock will ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to protect your personal information that comply with our legal obligations. To ensure this level of protection for your personal information, BlackRock typically uses a data transfer agreement with the recipient based on standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission. A copy of these clauses is available here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/international-transfers/transfer/index_en.htm. Further details of the transfers of your personal information outside of the European Union and the adequate safeguards used by BlackRock in respect of such transfers (including copies of relevant agreements) are available from us by contacting groupprivacy@blackrock.com. You can also use this e-mail address to request further information about the entities that comprise the BlackRock Group and the countries in which they operate.

How long we keep your personal information

We will hold your personal information on BlackRock’s systems for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purpose for which it was collected or to comply with legal, regulatory or internal policy requirements.

Protection of your personal information

We use a range of physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your personal information secure, accurate and up to date. These measures include:

• education and training to relevant staff to ensure they are aware of our privacy obligations when handling personal information as well as training around social engineering, phishing, spear phishing, and password risks
• administrative and technical controls to restrict access to personal information on a ‘need to know’ basis
• technological security measures, including fire walls, encryption (industry standard SSL encryption with 128-bit key lengths), and anti-virus software
• physical security measures, such as staff security passes to access our premises.
• external technical assessments, security audits and vendor due diligence
• perimeter security: Firewalls, IDS, content filters
• segregation of networks: DMZ, corporate domain, production domain
• application security: OWASP top 10 focused code requirements, application testing, penetration testing
• endpoint security: Anti-virus, portable storage device lockdown, restricted administrative privileges
• Real-time monitoring of data leakage controls
• Layered and comprehensive cybersecurity defences
• Security incident reporting and management.

Although we use appropriate security measures once we have received your personal information, the transmission of data over the internet (including by e-mail) is never completely secure. We endeavour to protect personal information, but we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to us or by us.

Your rights and how to contact us

You have various rights in relation to your personal information. In particular, you have a right to:
• object to the processing or your personal information
• request a copy of personal information we hold about you
• ask that we update the personal information we hold about you, or correct such personal information that you think is incorrect or incomplete
• ask that we delete personal information that we hold about you, or restrict the way in which we use such personal information
• withdraw consent to our processing of your personal information (to the extent such processing is based on consent).

To exercise any of your rights, or if you have any other questions about our use of your personal information, please e-mail groupprivacy@blackrock.com or write to BlackRock’s Global Privacy and Data Protection Officer at 12 Throgmorton Avenue, London, EC2N 2DL, United Kingdom. You may also use these contact details if you wish to make a complaint to us relating to your privacy.

If you are unhappy with the way we handled your personal information or any privacy query or request that you have raised with us, you also have a right to complain to a data protection regulator in the place where you live or work, or in the place where you think an issue in relation to your data has arisen. A list of national data protection regulators can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/dataprotection/bodies/authorities/index_en.htm.

Changes to this privacy statement

We may modify or amend this privacy statement from time to time.

Any future changes or additions to the processing of your personal data as described in this notice affecting you will be communicated to you through an appropriate channel, depending on how we normally communicate with you.

Cookies Policy

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are stored in your computer’s memory and hard drive, in your mobile device or tablet when you visit certain web pages. They are used to enable websites to function or to provide information to the owners of a website, or other third parties which receive data obtained from that website.

When you visit any web site, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you, your preferences or your device and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to. The information does not usually directly identify you, but it can give you a more personalised web experience.

Why do we use cookies?

Cookies help us to provide customised services and information. We use cookies on our Website to tell us, in general terms, how and when pages on our Website are visited, what our users’ technology preferences are – such as what type of video player they use – and whether our Website is functioning properly. Depending on their purpose, some cookies will only operate for the length of a single browsing session, whilst others have a longer life span to ensure that they fulfil their longer-term purposes (as explained in more detail below). Please note that, however long the cookies’ active life may be, you can delete cookies (and therefore stop any further data collection by them) as further described below.

If you are using one of our password-protected sites, then the Website may use cookies or other technology to help us authenticate you, store and recognise your configuration and user attributes, facilitate your navigation of the website and customise its content so that the information made available is likely to be of more interest to you.

In broad terms, we use cookies on our Website for the following purposes:
• Analytical purposes: Analytical cookies allow us to recognise, measure and track visitors to our Website and compile a record of this usage information. This helps us to improve and develop the way our Website works, for example, by determining whether site visitors can find information easily, or by identifying the aspects of websites that are of the most interest to them.
• Usage preferences: Some of the cookies on our Website are activated when visitors to our sites make a choice about their usage of the site. Our Website then ‘remembers’ the settings preferences of the user concerned. This allows us to tailor aspects of our sites to the individual user.
• Terms and conditions: We use cookies on our Website in order to record when a site visitor has seen a policy, such as this one, or provided consent, such as consent to the terms and conditions on our Website. This helps to improve the user’s experience of the site – for example, it aids in avoiding a situation where a user is asked repeatedly to consent to the same terms. We also track whether a user has seen other similar documents (such as an online survey) before – again, to ensure that a user’s experience of our Website is a smooth one.
• Session management: The software that runs our Website uses cookies for technical purposes needed by the internal workings of our servers. For instance, we use cookies to distribute requests among multiple servers, to authenticate users, and to determine what features of the site they can access, verify the origin of requests, keep track of information about a user’s session and determine which options or pages to display in order for the site to function.
• Functional purposes: Functional purpose cookies store information that is needed by our applications to process and operate. For example, where transactions or requests within an application involve multiple workflow stages, cookies are used to store the information from each stage temporarily, in order to facilitate completion of the overall transaction or request.
• Advertising: Advertising cookies allow us (or third parties) to monitor the behaviour of users of our Website. This information is used to ensure that products and services highlighted to those individuals are targeted in a focused and relevant manner – e.g. through advertisements on BlackRock websites or through advertisements on third party websites (e.g., Bloomberg, Agefi.com, Handlesblatt.de, etc) which are based on your experience with our Website; or to monitor the effectiveness of those digital marketing campaigns. We also monitor whether the adverts displayed on our Website are of interest to users and retain this information to ensure that adverts seen by users of our Website over a period of time are appropriate.

Please note that third parties may use cookies. The kind of cookies and the consequent data processing carried out by such third parties are regulated by their privacy policies. Please see below for more information about third party cookies.

Your cookie preferences

Cookies are necessary in order for you to be able to make full use of BlackRock’s Website. In addition, cookies help us provide you with personalised features on our Website. If you chose to disable cookies, some of BlackRock’s Website’s functionality might be impaired.

Local Flash Storage

On certain pages of our Website, we include content designed for display using Adobe Flash Player, such as animations, videos and tools. Local flash storage (often referred to as “Flash cookies”) can be used to help improve your experience as a user. Flash storage is retained on your device in much the same way as standard cookies, but is managed directly by your Flash software.

If you wish to disable or delete information stored locally in Flash, please see the documentation for your Flash software, located at www.adobe.com. Please note that, if you disable Flash cookies, some site functionality may not work.

Third party cookies

When you visit our Website, you may receive cookies that are set by third parties. These may include cookies set by Google, Bizo, LinkedIn, AppNexus, Xaxis, MediaMind and/or Rocketfuel. These cookies are used for the purposes described in the “Why Do We Use Cookies?” section of this policy. We do not control the setting of these third party cookies, so we suggest you might wish to check the third party websites for more information about their use of cookies and how to manage them.

Amending cookie preferences

If you wish to remove cookies set by our Website from your browser in the future, you may delete them. The instructions for removing cookies from your computer or mobile device depend on the operating system and web browser you use. Please note, however, that withdrawing your agreement to the use of cookies on our sites will impair the functionality of the sites.

 The site www.allaboutcookies.org includes instructions for managing cookies on many commonly used browses, or you may consult the vendor documentation for your specific software.

Further information about cookies

If you would like to find out more about cookies in general and how to manage them, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

By accessing this website, you, as a client or potential client, accept to receive information on this website in more than one language.

On this website, the Institutional site is for pension schemes, consultants or other professional investors.

Terms and conditions

Please read this page before proceeding, as it explains certain restrictions imposed by law on the distribution of this information and the countries in which our funds are authorised for sale. It is your responsibility to be aware of and to observe all applicable laws and regulations of any relevant jurisdiction.

Please note that you are required to read and accept the terms of our Privacy Policy before you are able to access our websites.

Once you have confirmed that you agree to the legal information in this document, and the Privacy Policy – by indicating your consent above – we will place a cookie on your computer to recognise you and prevent this page reappearing should you access this site, or other BlackRock sites, on future occasions.  The cookie will expire after six months, or sooner should there be a material change to this important information.

By confirming that you have read this important information, you also:
(i) Agree that such information will apply to any subsequent access to the Individual investors (or Institutions / Intermediaries) section of this website by you, and that all such subsequent access will be subject to the disclaimers, risk warnings and other information set out herein; and
(ii) Warrant that no other person will access the Individual investors section of this website from the same computer and logon as you are currently using.

The BlackRock authorised unit trusts are funds authorised under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and are generally available for investment by the public in the UK.

The offshore funds described in the following pages are administered and managed by companies within the BlackRock Group and can be marketed in certain jurisdictions only. It is your responsibility to be aware of the applicable laws and regulations of your country of residence. Further information is available in the Prospectus or other constitutional document for each fund. Please note that only some of the offshore funds seek distributor status in the UK.

The BlackRock Pensions Funds are available through the products of BlackRock Life Limited (authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority). They are available only to trustees and members of pension schemes registered under Part IV of the Finance Act 2004 via an insurance policy which would be issued either by BlackRock Life Limited, or by another insurer of such business.

This does not constitute an offer or solicitation to sell shares in any of the funds referred to on this site, by anyone in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or distribution would be unlawful or in which the person making such offer or solicitation is not qualified to do so or to anyone to whom it is unlawful to make such offer or solicitation.

Specifically, the funds described are not available for distribution to or investment by US investors. The units/shares will not be registered under the US Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act") and, except in a transaction which does not violate the Securities Act or any other applicable US securities laws (including without limitation any applicable law of any of the States of the USA) may not be directly or indirectly offered or sold in the USA or any of its territories or possessions or areas subject to its jurisdiction or to or for the benefit of a US Person.

The funds described have not been, nor will they be, qualified for distribution to the public in Canada as no prospectus for these funds has been filed with any securities commission or regulatory authority in Canada or any province or territory thereof. This website is not, and under no circumstances is to be construed, as an advertisement or any other step in furtherance of a public offering of shares in Canada. No person resident in Canada for the purposes of the Income Tax Act (Canada) may purchase or accept a transfer of shares in the funds described unless he or she is eligible to do so under applicable Canadian or provincial laws.

Applications to invest in any fund referred to on this site, must only be made on the basis of the offer document relating to the specific investment (e.g. prospectus, simplified prospectus, key investor information document or other applicable terms and conditions).

As a result of money laundering regulations, additional documentation for identification purposes may be required when you make your investment. Details are contained in the relevant Prospectus or other constitutional document.

If you are unsure about the meaning of any information provided please consult your financial or other professional adviser.

The information contained on this site is subject to copyright with all rights reserved. It must not be reproduced, copied or redistributed in whole or in part.

The information contained on this site is published in good faith but no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited or by any person as to its accuracy or completeness and it should not be relied on as such. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited shall have no liability, save for any liability that BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited may have under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (or the name of any replacement legislation if the legislation permits such a statement to be made), for any loss or damage arising out of the use or reliance on the information provided including without limitation, any loss of profit or any other damage, direct or consequential. No information on this site constitutes investment, tax, legal or any other advice.

Where a claim is brought against BlackRock by a third party in relation to your use of this website, you hereby agree to fully reimburse BlackRock for all losses, costs, actions, proceedings, claims, damages, expenses (including reasonable legal costs and expenses), or liabilities, whatsoever suffered or incurred directly by BlackRock as a consequence of improper use of this website.  Neither party should be liable to the other for any loss or damage which may be suffered by the other party due to any cause beyond the first party's reasonable control including without limitation any power failure.
You acknowledge and agree that it is your responsibility to keep secure and confidential any passwords that we issue to you and your authorised employees and not to let such password(s) become public knowledge. If any password(s) become known by someone other than you and your authorised employees, you must change those particular password(s) immediately using the function available for this purpose on the Website.

You may leave the BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited website when you access certain links on this website. In so doing, you may be proceeding to the site of an organisation that is not regulated under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited has not examined any of these websites and does not assume any responsibility for the contents of such websites nor the services, products or items offered through such websites.

BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited shall have no liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to, any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the services provided herein.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
The value of investments and the income from them may go down as well as up and are not guaranteed.
You may not get back the amount you invested.
Any favourable tax treatment of a product (including but not limited to ISAs) is subject to government legislation and as such may not be maintained.
The levels and bases of, and reliefs from, taxation changed in the last Budget and may change in the future.
Rates of exchange may cause the value of investments to go up or down.
Fluctuation may be particularly marked in the case of a higher volatility fund and the value of an investment may fall suddenly and substantially.
For your protection, telephone calls are usually recorded.

Please note that while some of the BlackRock funds are "ring-fenced", others form part of a single company and are not. For BlackRock funds that do not have segregated liability status, in the event of a single BlackRock fund being unable to meet liabilities attributable to that BlackRock fund out of the assets attributable to it, the excess may be met out of the assets attributable to the other BlackRock funds within the same company. We refer you to the prospectus or other relevant terms and conditions of each BlackRock fund for further information in this regard.

The BlackRock unit trusts are managed by BlackRock Fund Managers Limited (authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and a member of the Investment Management Association) which is the unit trust management affiliate of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited.

The BlackRock ISA are managed by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited (authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority).

Companies within the BlackRock Group which do not carry out investment business in the UK are not subject to the provisions of the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Accordingly, investors entering into investment agreements with such companies will not have the protection afforded by that Act or the rules and regulations made under it, including the UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of BlackRock as a whole or any part thereof, nor do they constitute investment or any other advice.

Any research found on these pages has been procured and may have been acted on by BlackRock for its own purposes.

This site is operated and issued by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (Register number 119293). You can gain access to the FCA's rules and guidance notes from the following link: http://www.fca.org.uk. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited is a company registered in England, No. 2020394. Registered Office: 12 Throgmorton Avenue, London EC2N 2DL. BlackRock is a trading name of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited. VAT No GB 888 4204 87. General enquiries about this website should be sent to EMEAwebmaster@blackrock.com. This email address should not be used for any enquiries relating to investments.

Important Information

An S&P Capital IQ fund grading represents an opinion only and should not be relied on when making an investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Currency exchange rates may affect the value of investments. Copyright © 2014 by McGraw-Hill international (UK) Limited (S&P), a subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2014 Morningstar. All Rights Reserved. The information, data, analyses, and opinions contained herein (1) include the proprietary information of Morningstar, (2) may not be copied or redistributed, (3) do not constitute investment advice offered by Morningstar, (4) are provided solely for informational purposes and therefore are not an offer to buy or sell a security, and (5) are not warranted to be correct, complete, or accurate. Morningstar shall not be responsible for any trading decisions, damages, or other losses resulting from, or related to, this information, data, analyses, or opinions or their use. The Morningstar Analyst Rating™ is subjective in nature and reflects Morningstar’s current expectations of future events/behaviour as they relate to a particular fund. Because such events/behaviour may turn out to be different than expected, Morningstar does not guarantee that a fund will perform in line with its Morningstar Analyst Rating. Likewise, the Morningstar Analyst Rating should not be seen as any sort of guarantee or assessment of the creditworthiness of a fund or of its underlying securities and should not be used as the sole basis for making any investment decision.

Privacy policy

Last revised: May 11 2018

Summary

This Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand what information we gather about you, what we use that information for, and with whom we share that information. It also sets out your rights in relation to your information and whom you may contact for more information or queries. Click on the links below to take you to the more detailed sections of this Privacy Policy:

• To whom this privacy statement applies and what it covers
• About other areas of blackrock.com and ishares.com
• What information we collect 
• How we use information about you 
• The legal grounds we rely on for processing personal information 
• To whom we disclose your information 
• Protection of your personal information 
• How long we keep your information for 
• Your rights and how to contact us 
• Changes to this privacy statement

To whom this privacy policy applies and what it covers

This privacy policy applies to each member of BlackRock’s group of companies (the “BlackRock Group”) and the entities we own or control (“BlackRock” or “we”, “us” or “our”). For more details on each of us (including our names, registered office addresses and contact details), please click here.  

BlackRock recognizes the importance of protecting your personal and financial information and is committed to doing this. This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, handle, store and protect information about you when:

• we provide products or services to you or our client;
• you visit or use our Website; and/or
• performing any other activities that form part of our business.

When we refer to “our Website” or “this Website” in this Privacy Policy, we mean the specific webpages of blackrock.com or ishares.com, and to specific webpages with a URL that begin with or contain blackrock.com/… or ishares.com/… .

BlackRock.com and iShares.com are comprised of various global, country or regional websites, each of which is provided by BlackRock.

This Privacy Policy also contains information about when we share your personal information with other members of the BlackRock Group and other third parties (for example, our service providers).

In this Privacy Policy, we may sometimes collectively refer to handling, collecting, protecting and storing your personal information as “processing” such personal information.

Other websites

Please note that other websites that may be linked to by this Website are not governed by this Privacy Policy. We encourage visitors to review the privacy policy on each of these other websites before disclosing any personal information.

What information we collect

In the course of providing products or services to you or our client and performing due diligence checks in connection with our products or services (or discussing the possible products or services we might provide), we generally collect personal information about you. We also typically collect personal information about you when you visit or use our Website.

We typically collect or obtain your personal information because you give it to us (for example, in a form on our Website) or because other people give that information to us (for example, third party service providers that we use to help operate our Website or your employer where it receives products or services from BlackRock). We may also collect or obtain personal information from you because we observe or infer that information about you from the way you interact with us. For example, if you use our risk management platform, Aladdin, we will generally collect information about you in order to communicate updates to Aladdin functionality and general information about Aladdin. In order to improve your experience when you use this Website and to ensure that it is functioning effectively, we (or our service providers) also use cookies (small text files stored in a user’s browser) and web beacons (small graphic images that are placed on a website and used to monitor a user’s interaction with that website) which may collect personal information.

Additional information on how we use cookies and other tracking technologies and how you can control these can be found in our Cookies Policy, which is included at the end of this document.

The personal information that we may collect depends on the specific services, activities or products we undertake but typically includes: your name; age; date of birth; gender; home address; email address; telephone number; other contact details; country of residence; passport number and other national ID numbers; employment details (for example, the organization you work for, your job title); family circumstances (for example, your marital status where you enter it in a form on our Website or it appears in any documentation you provide to us); financial and tax related information (for example, your income, assets and tax residency where you enter such information in a form on our Website or it appears in any documentation that you provide to us); details of how you use any product or service provided by BlackRock; postings on any blogs, forums, wikis, and any other social media applications and services that we provide; IP address; browser and device type; user name that is used by you for one of our products or services; language; access times and duration; details of how you like to use our Website or the interactive products, tools, other technology or services we provide to you or our clients; websites that you visited before and after visiting our Website; details of how you like to interact with us, and similar information.

The types of personal information and ‘sensitive’ or ‘special categories’ of personal information that we collect will generally vary depending on the nature of the products and services that we provide to you and how you use our Website. In some cases, the ‘sensitive’ or ‘special categories’ of personal information that we collect include: your dietary requirements (for example, where we would like to provide you with lunch during a meeting); your health (for example, so that we can make reasonable accommodations for you in our buildings); your sexual orientation (for example, if you provide us with details of your spouse or partner); and any criminal convictions that you may have (for example, if this information is collected as part of ‘know your client’ and anti-money laundering checks that we must conduct before accepting you or your employer as a client).

In some rare circumstances, we will also gather other ‘special categories’ of personal information about you because you volunteer that data to us (for example, it appears in a copy of your resume/CV that you upload to our Website). In some other circumstances, the personal information we collect from you is needed to meet our legal or regulatory obligations or to provide you with the products or services requested by you or our client (who may be your employer). If so, we will indicate to you that the provision of this information is mandatory, and the consequences if we cannot collect this information.

In some cases, we will also collect personal information about you indirectly from third parties such as: (i) your employer where we provide it with products or services; (ii) third parties such as providers of ‘know your client’ and anti-money laundering services which we sometimes use to help us meet our legal requirements in this area and to help us verify your identity where we provide you or your employer with products or services; (iii) intermediaries (such as independent financial advisers); (iv) background check providers which we sometimes use to verify your identity when you apply for a job through our Website; (v) third party service providers that help us to operate our Website; and (vi) from publicly available sources such as business and employment oriented social networking services and jobs boards.

How we use information about you

Use of personal information to provide products and services

We will use your personal information to provide you or our client with products or services. As part of this, we may use your personal information in the course of correspondence relating to those products or services. Such correspondence may be with you, our client, other members of the BlackRock Group, our service providers or public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation.

In many cases, we also use your personal information to conduct due diligence checks in advance of providing products or services to you or our client, and to process an application from you or a prospective client to receive products or services from us. If you are referred to us by an intermediary or similar third party, we also typically use your personal information to assess whether to accept or reject your referral to BlackRock by that intermediary or similar third party.

Because we provide a wide range of products and services to our clients, the way in which we use personal information in relation to our products and services varies. For example, we use personal information about you when:

• you use our risk management platform, Aladdin
• we provide you or your employer with an insurance product or service
• you or your employer engage us to provide investment management or similar services 
• you privately invest in a fund product managed by a member of the BlackRock Group
• you engage a member of the BlackRock Group to provide investment management services
• you provide us with your personal information via email or a web form.

Use of personal information collected via our Website
We generally use your personal information collected via this Website:

• to manage and improve any services provided via our Website
• to manage and improve our Website (including by drawing up statistics on the usage of our Website)
• to tailor content of our Website to provide you with a more personalised experience and draw your attention to information about products and services that may be of interest to you
• to manage and respond to any request that you submit through our Website
• to help us learn more about you, the products and services that you or your employer receive from BlackRock, and other products and services that you or your employer might be interested in receiving
• to correspond with you in relation to services you use on our Website or information you provide via our Website. This correspondence is usually with you, other members of the BlackRock Group, our service providers, or public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation.

Use of personal information for other activities that form part of the operation of our business

We generally also use your personal information collected via this Website for the purposes of, or in connection with:
• applicable legal or regulatory requirements
• requests and communications from public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation
• financial accounting, invoicing and risk analysis purposes
• prudent operational management (including credit and risk management, insurance, audit, training and similar administrative purposes)
• client relationship purposes, which involve: (i) sending you BlackRock thought leadership or details of BlackRock products and services that we think might be of interest to you or your employer; (ii) contacting you to receive feedback on BlackRock products or services; and (iii) contacting you for other marketing or research purposes
• recruitment and business development purposes
• services we receive from our professional advisors, such as lawyers, accountants and consultants
• arrangements we have in place with intermediaries, brokers and other individuals and entities that partner with us
• considering, and entering into, any transaction involving part or all of the business or assets of the BlackRock Group
• protecting our rights and those of our clients
• meeting our corporate and social responsibilities.

The legal grounds we rely on for processing personal information

We are required by law to set out in this Privacy Policy the legal grounds on which we rely in order to process your personal information.

We generally use your personal information for the purposes outlined above because: (a) it is necessary for our legitimate interests and does not unduly affect your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms (see below); (b) it is necessary for legal and/or regulatory obligations or requests that we are subject to, such as keeping records for tax purposes or providing information to a public body or law enforcement agency; (c) it is necessary to perform contractual obligations that we owe towards you or our client, or to take pre-contractual steps at the request of you or our client; (d) it is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest (such as assisting with diversity in the workplace where you make contact through our Website in relation to job opportunities at BlackRock); or (e) in some cases, we have obtained your prior consent.

Examples of the ‘legitimate interests’ referenced above are: (i) to benefit from cost-effective services (for example, we may opt to use certain IT platforms offered by our service providers); (ii) to assess and verify any job application that you submit through the Website; (iii) to prevent fraud or criminal activity, misuses of our products and services, as well as the security of our IT systems, architecture and networks; (iv) to exercise our rights under Articles 16 and 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, including our freedom to conduct a business and right to property; and (v) to meet our corporate and social responsibility objectives.

To the extent that we process any sensitive personal information relating to you for any of the purposes outlined above, we will do so because either: (1) you have given us your explicit consent to process that information; (2) the processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest on the basis of applicable law (for example where we are required by law or regulatory requirements to process that information in order to ensure we meet our ‘know your client’ and ‘anti money laundering’ obligations); (3) the processing is necessary to carry out our obligations under employment, social security or social protection law; or (4) the processing is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims. The legal grounds for processing sensitive personal information outlined above at (1) to (4) appear at Articles 9(2)(a), 9(2)(g), 9(2)(b) and 9(2)(f) of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation respectively.

Where we are legally required to obtain your explicit consent to provide you with certain marketing materials, we will only provide you with such marketing materials where we have obtained such consent from you.

If you do not want to continue receiving any marketing materials from us, you can click on the unsubscribe function in the communication or e-mail groupprivacy@blackrock.com at any time.

To whom we disclose your information

In connection with one or more of the purposes outlined in the “How we use information about you” section above, we generally disclose details about you to: other members of the BlackRock Group; professional advisors and third parties that provide services to us and/or other members of the BlackRock Group (such as IT systems providers, platform providers, financial advisors, consultants (including lawyers and accountants), providers of HR and recruitment services and other goods and services providers (such as providers of marketing services where we are permitted to disclose your personal information to them); intermediaries, brokers, and other individuals and entities that partner with us; competent authorities (including any national and/or international regulatory or enforcement body or court or other form of tribunal, where we (or any other member of the BlackRock Group) are required to do so by applicable law or regulation at their request); a potential buyer, transferee, merger partner or seller and their advisers in connection with an actual or potential transfer or merger of part or all of BlackRock’s business or assets, or any associated rights or interests, or to acquire a business or enter into a merger with it; credit reference agencies or other organizations that help us detect criminal activity and incidence of fraud; and any central or local government department and other statutory or public bodies.

If you are an individual in the European Union, please note that some of the recipients of your personal information referenced above will be based in countries outside of the European Union whose laws may not provide the same level of data protection. Those countries typically include: the United States, Canada, Singapore, and India. In such cases, BlackRock will ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to protect your personal information that comply with our legal obligations. To ensure this level of protection for your personal information, BlackRock typically uses a data transfer agreement with the recipient based on standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission. A copy of these clauses is available here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/international-transfers/transfer/index_en.htm. Further details of the transfers of your personal information outside of the European Union and the adequate safeguards used by BlackRock in respect of such transfers (including copies of relevant agreements) are available from us by contacting groupprivacy@blackrock.com. You can also use this e-mail address to request further information about the entities that comprise the BlackRock Group and the countries in which they operate.

How long we keep your personal information

We will hold your personal information on BlackRock’s systems for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purpose for which it was collected or to comply with legal, regulatory or internal policy requirements.

Protection of your personal information

We use a range of physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your personal information secure, accurate and up to date. These measures include:

• education and training to relevant staff to ensure they are aware of our privacy obligations when handling personal information as well as training around social engineering, phishing, spear phishing, and password risks
• administrative and technical controls to restrict access to personal information on a ‘need to know’ basis
• technological security measures, including fire walls, encryption (industry standard SSL encryption with 128-bit key lengths), and anti-virus software
• physical security measures, such as staff security passes to access our premises.
• external technical assessments, security audits and vendor due diligence
• perimeter security: Firewalls, IDS, content filters
• segregation of networks: DMZ, corporate domain, production domain
• application security: OWASP top 10 focused code requirements, application testing, penetration testing
• endpoint security: Anti-virus, portable storage device lockdown, restricted administrative privileges
• Real-time monitoring of data leakage controls
• Layered and comprehensive cybersecurity defences
• Security incident reporting and management.

Although we use appropriate security measures once we have received your personal information, the transmission of data over the internet (including by e-mail) is never completely secure. We endeavour to protect personal information, but we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to us or by us.

Your rights and how to contact us

You have various rights in relation to your personal information. In particular, you have a right to:
• object to the processing or your personal information
• request a copy of personal information we hold about you
• ask that we update the personal information we hold about you, or correct such personal information that you think is incorrect or incomplete
• ask that we delete personal information that we hold about you, or restrict the way in which we use such personal information
• withdraw consent to our processing of your personal information (to the extent such processing is based on consent).

To exercise any of your rights, or if you have any other questions about our use of your personal information, please e-mail groupprivacy@blackrock.com or write to BlackRock’s Global Privacy and Data Protection Officer at 12 Throgmorton Avenue, London, EC2N 2DL, United Kingdom. You may also use these contact details if you wish to make a complaint to us relating to your privacy.

If you are unhappy with the way we handled your personal information or any privacy query or request that you have raised with us, you also have a right to complain to a data protection regulator in the place where you live or work, or in the place where you think an issue in relation to your data has arisen. A list of national data protection regulators can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/dataprotection/bodies/authorities/index_en.htm.

Changes to this privacy statement

We may modify or amend this privacy statement from time to time.

Any future changes or additions to the processing of your personal data as described in this notice affecting you will be communicated to you through an appropriate channel, depending on how we normally communicate with you.

Cookies Policy

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are stored in your computer’s memory and hard drive, in your mobile device or tablet when you visit certain web pages. They are used to enable websites to function or to provide information to the owners of a website, or other third parties which receive data obtained from that website.

When you visit any web site, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you, your preferences or your device and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to. The information does not usually directly identify you, but it can give you a more personalised web experience.

Why do we use cookies?

Cookies help us to provide customised services and information. We use cookies on our Website to tell us, in general terms, how and when pages on our Website are visited, what our users’ technology preferences are – such as what type of video player they use – and whether our Website is functioning properly. Depending on their purpose, some cookies will only operate for the length of a single browsing session, whilst others have a longer life span to ensure that they fulfil their longer-term purposes (as explained in more detail below). Please note that, however long the cookies’ active life may be, you can delete cookies (and therefore stop any further data collection by them) as further described below.

If you are using one of our password-protected sites, then the Website may use cookies or other technology to help us authenticate you, store and recognise your configuration and user attributes, facilitate your navigation of the website and customise its content so that the information made available is likely to be of more interest to you.

In broad terms, we use cookies on our Website for the following purposes:
• Analytical purposes: Analytical cookies allow us to recognise, measure and track visitors to our Website and compile a record of this usage information. This helps us to improve and develop the way our Website works, for example, by determining whether site visitors can find information easily, or by identifying the aspects of websites that are of the most interest to them.
• Usage preferences: Some of the cookies on our Website are activated when visitors to our sites make a choice about their usage of the site. Our Website then ‘remembers’ the settings preferences of the user concerned. This allows us to tailor aspects of our sites to the individual user.
• Terms and conditions: We use cookies on our Website in order to record when a site visitor has seen a policy, such as this one, or provided consent, such as consent to the terms and conditions on our Website. This helps to improve the user’s experience of the site – for example, it aids in avoiding a situation where a user is asked repeatedly to consent to the same terms. We also track whether a user has seen other similar documents (such as an online survey) before – again, to ensure that a user’s experience of our Website is a smooth one.
• Session management: The software that runs our Website uses cookies for technical purposes needed by the internal workings of our servers. For instance, we use cookies to distribute requests among multiple servers, to authenticate users, and to determine what features of the site they can access, verify the origin of requests, keep track of information about a user’s session and determine which options or pages to display in order for the site to function.
• Functional purposes: Functional purpose cookies store information that is needed by our applications to process and operate. For example, where transactions or requests within an application involve multiple workflow stages, cookies are used to store the information from each stage temporarily, in order to facilitate completion of the overall transaction or request.
• Advertising: Advertising cookies allow us (or third parties) to monitor the behaviour of users of our Website. This information is used to ensure that products and services highlighted to those individuals are targeted in a focused and relevant manner – e.g. through advertisements on BlackRock websites or through advertisements on third party websites (e.g., Bloomberg, Agefi.com, Handlesblatt.de, etc) which are based on your experience with our Website; or to monitor the effectiveness of those digital marketing campaigns. We also monitor whether the adverts displayed on our Website are of interest to users and retain this information to ensure that adverts seen by users of our Website over a period of time are appropriate.

Please note that third parties may use cookies. The kind of cookies and the consequent data processing carried out by such third parties are regulated by their privacy policies. Please see below for more information about third party cookies.

Your cookie preferences

Cookies are necessary in order for you to be able to make full use of BlackRock’s Website. In addition, cookies help us provide you with personalised features on our Website. If you chose to disable cookies, some of BlackRock’s Website’s functionality might be impaired.

Local Flash Storage

On certain pages of our Website, we include content designed for display using Adobe Flash Player, such as animations, videos and tools. Local flash storage (often referred to as “Flash cookies”) can be used to help improve your experience as a user. Flash storage is retained on your device in much the same way as standard cookies, but is managed directly by your Flash software.

If you wish to disable or delete information stored locally in Flash, please see the documentation for your Flash software, located at www.adobe.com. Please note that, if you disable Flash cookies, some site functionality may not work.

Third party cookies

When you visit our Website, you may receive cookies that are set by third parties. These may include cookies set by Google, Bizo, LinkedIn, AppNexus, Xaxis, MediaMind and/or Rocketfuel. These cookies are used for the purposes described in the “Why Do We Use Cookies?” section of this policy. We do not control the setting of these third party cookies, so we suggest you might wish to check the third party websites for more information about their use of cookies and how to manage them.

Amending cookie preferences

If you wish to remove cookies set by our Website from your browser in the future, you may delete them. The instructions for removing cookies from your computer or mobile device depend on the operating system and web browser you use. Please note, however, that withdrawing your agreement to the use of cookies on our sites will impair the functionality of the sites.

 The site www.allaboutcookies.org includes instructions for managing cookies on many commonly used browses, or you may consult the vendor documentation for your specific software.

Further information about cookies

If you would like to find out more about cookies in general and how to manage them, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.

By accessing this website, you, as a client or potential client, accept to receive information on this website in more than one language.

The Charities site is for representatives of UK Registered Charities that meet the definition of a ‘professional client’ as defined in the FCA Handbook, COBS 3.5.

Terms and conditions

Please read this page before proceeding, as it explains certain restrictions imposed by law on the distribution of this information and the countries in which our funds are authorised for sale. It is your responsibility to be aware of and to observe all applicable laws and regulations of any relevant jurisdiction.

Please note that you are required to read and accept the terms of our Privacy Policy before you are able to access our websites.

Once you have confirmed that you agree to the legal information in this document, and the Privacy Policy – by indicating your consent above – we will place a cookie on your computer to recognise you and prevent this page reappearing should you access this site, or other BlackRock sites, on future occasions.  The cookie will expire after six months, or sooner should there be a material change to this important information.

By confirming that you have read this important information, you also:
(i) Agree that such information will apply to any subsequent access to the Individual investors (or Institutions / Intermediaries) section of this website by you, and that all such subsequent access will be subject to the disclaimers, risk warnings and other information set out herein; and
(ii) Warrant that no other person will access the Individual investors section of this website from the same computer and logon as you are currently using.

The BlackRock authorised unit trusts are funds authorised under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 and are generally available for investment by the public in the UK.

The offshore funds described in the following pages are administered and managed by companies within the BlackRock Group and can be marketed in certain jurisdictions only. It is your responsibility to be aware of the applicable laws and regulations of your country of residence. Further information is available in the Prospectus or other constitutional document for each fund. Please note that only some of the offshore funds seek distributor status in the UK.

The BlackRock Pensions Funds are available through the products of BlackRock Life Limited (authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority). They are available only to trustees and members of pension schemes registered under Part IV of the Finance Act 2004 via an insurance policy which would be issued either by BlackRock Life Limited, or by another insurer of such business.

This does not constitute an offer or solicitation to sell shares in any of the funds referred to on this site, by anyone in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or distribution would be unlawful or in which the person making such offer or solicitation is not qualified to do so or to anyone to whom it is unlawful to make such offer or solicitation.

Specifically, the funds described are not available for distribution to or investment by US investors. The units/shares will not be registered under the US Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act") and, except in a transaction which does not violate the Securities Act or any other applicable US securities laws (including without limitation any applicable law of any of the States of the USA) may not be directly or indirectly offered or sold in the USA or any of its territories or possessions or areas subject to its jurisdiction or to or for the benefit of a US Person.

The funds described have not been, nor will they be, qualified for distribution to the public in Canada as no prospectus for these funds has been filed with any securities commission or regulatory authority in Canada or any province or territory thereof. This website is not, and under no circumstances is to be construed, as an advertisement or any other step in furtherance of a public offering of shares in Canada. No person resident in Canada for the purposes of the Income Tax Act (Canada) may purchase or accept a transfer of shares in the funds described unless he or she is eligible to do so under applicable Canadian or provincial laws.

Applications to invest in any fund referred to on this site, must only be made on the basis of the offer document relating to the specific investment (e.g. prospectus, simplified prospectus, key investor information document or other applicable terms and conditions).

As a result of money laundering regulations, additional documentation for identification purposes may be required when you make your investment. Details are contained in the relevant Prospectus or other constitutional document.

If you are unsure about the meaning of any information provided please consult your financial or other professional adviser.

The information contained on this site is subject to copyright with all rights reserved. It must not be reproduced, copied or redistributed in whole or in part.

The information contained on this site is published in good faith but no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited or by any person as to its accuracy or completeness and it should not be relied on as such. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited shall have no liability, save for any liability that BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited may have under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (or the name of any replacement legislation if the legislation permits such a statement to be made), for any loss or damage arising out of the use or reliance on the information provided including without limitation, any loss of profit or any other damage, direct or consequential. No information on this site constitutes investment, tax, legal or any other advice.

Where a claim is brought against BlackRock by a third party in relation to your use of this website, you hereby agree to fully reimburse BlackRock for all losses, costs, actions, proceedings, claims, damages, expenses (including reasonable legal costs and expenses), or liabilities, whatsoever suffered or incurred directly by BlackRock as a consequence of improper use of this website.  Neither party should be liable to the other for any loss or damage which may be suffered by the other party due to any cause beyond the first party's reasonable control including without limitation any power failure.
You acknowledge and agree that it is your responsibility to keep secure and confidential any passwords that we issue to you and your authorised employees and not to let such password(s) become public knowledge. If any password(s) become known by someone other than you and your authorised employees, you must change those particular password(s) immediately using the function available for this purpose on the Website.

You may leave the BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited website when you access certain links on this website. In so doing, you may be proceeding to the site of an organisation that is not regulated under the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited has not examined any of these websites and does not assume any responsibility for the contents of such websites nor the services, products or items offered through such websites.

BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited shall have no liability for any data transmission errors such as data loss or damage or alteration of any kind, including, but not limited to, any direct, indirect or consequential damage, arising out of the use of the services provided herein.

Past performance is no guarantee of future performance.
The value of investments and the income from them may go down as well as up and are not guaranteed.
You may not get back the amount you invested.
Any favourable tax treatment of a product (including but not limited to ISAs) is subject to government legislation and as such may not be maintained.
The levels and bases of, and reliefs from, taxation changed in the last Budget and may change in the future.
Rates of exchange may cause the value of investments to go up or down.
Fluctuation may be particularly marked in the case of a higher volatility fund and the value of an investment may fall suddenly and substantially.
For your protection, telephone calls are usually recorded.

Please note that while some of the BlackRock funds are "ring-fenced", others form part of a single company and are not. For BlackRock funds that do not have segregated liability status, in the event of a single BlackRock fund being unable to meet liabilities attributable to that BlackRock fund out of the assets attributable to it, the excess may be met out of the assets attributable to the other BlackRock funds within the same company. We refer you to the prospectus or other relevant terms and conditions of each BlackRock fund for further information in this regard.

The BlackRock unit trusts are managed by BlackRock Fund Managers Limited (authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and a member of the Investment Management Association) which is the unit trust management affiliate of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited.

The BlackRock ISA are managed by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited (authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority).

Companies within the BlackRock Group which do not carry out investment business in the UK are not subject to the provisions of the UK Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. Accordingly, investors entering into investment agreements with such companies will not have the protection afforded by that Act or the rules and regulations made under it, including the UK's Financial Services Compensation Scheme.

The views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of BlackRock as a whole or any part thereof, nor do they constitute investment or any other advice.

Any research found on these pages has been procured and may have been acted on by BlackRock for its own purposes.

This site is operated and issued by BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (Register number 119293). You can gain access to the FCA's rules and guidance notes from the following link: http://www.fca.org.uk. BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited is a company registered in England, No. 2020394. Registered Office: 12 Throgmorton Avenue, London EC2N 2DL. BlackRock is a trading name of BlackRock Investment Management (UK) Limited. VAT No GB 888 4204 87. General enquiries about this website should be sent to EMEAwebmaster@blackrock.com. This email address should not be used for any enquiries relating to investments.

Important Information

An S&P Capital IQ fund grading represents an opinion only and should not be relied on when making an investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Currency exchange rates may affect the value of investments. Copyright © 2014 by McGraw-Hill international (UK) Limited (S&P), a subsidiary of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2014 Morningstar. All Rights Reserved. The information, data, analyses, and opinions contained herein (1) include the proprietary information of Morningstar, (2) may not be copied or redistributed, (3) do not constitute investment advice offered by Morningstar, (4) are provided solely for informational purposes and therefore are not an offer to buy or sell a security, and (5) are not warranted to be correct, complete, or accurate. Morningstar shall not be responsible for any trading decisions, damages, or other losses resulting from, or related to, this information, data, analyses, or opinions or their use. The Morningstar Analyst Rating™ is subjective in nature and reflects Morningstar’s current expectations of future events/behaviour as they relate to a particular fund. Because such events/behaviour may turn out to be different than expected, Morningstar does not guarantee that a fund will perform in line with its Morningstar Analyst Rating. Likewise, the Morningstar Analyst Rating should not be seen as any sort of guarantee or assessment of the creditworthiness of a fund or of its underlying securities and should not be used as the sole basis for making any investment decision.

Privacy policy

Last revised: May 11 2018

Summary

This Privacy Policy is designed to help you understand what information we gather about you, what we use that information for, and with whom we share that information. It also sets out your rights in relation to your information and whom you may contact for more information or queries. Click on the links below to take you to the more detailed sections of this Privacy Policy:

• To whom this privacy statement applies and what it covers
• About other areas of blackrock.com and ishares.com
• What information we collect 
• How we use information about you 
• The legal grounds we rely on for processing personal information 
• To whom we disclose your information 
• Protection of your personal information 
• How long we keep your information for 
• Your rights and how to contact us 
• Changes to this privacy statement

To whom this privacy policy applies and what it covers

This privacy policy applies to each member of BlackRock’s group of companies (the “BlackRock Group”) and the entities we own or control (“BlackRock” or “we”, “us” or “our”). For more details on each of us (including our names, registered office addresses and contact details), please click here.  

BlackRock recognizes the importance of protecting your personal and financial information and is committed to doing this. This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, handle, store and protect information about you when:

• we provide products or services to you or our client;
• you visit or use our Website; and/or
• performing any other activities that form part of our business.

When we refer to “our Website” or “this Website” in this Privacy Policy, we mean the specific webpages of blackrock.com or ishares.com, and to specific webpages with a URL that begin with or contain blackrock.com/… or ishares.com/… .

BlackRock.com and iShares.com are comprised of various global, country or regional websites, each of which is provided by BlackRock.

This Privacy Policy also contains information about when we share your personal information with other members of the BlackRock Group and other third parties (for example, our service providers).

In this Privacy Policy, we may sometimes collectively refer to handling, collecting, protecting and storing your personal information as “processing” such personal information.

Other websites

Please note that other websites that may be linked to by this Website are not governed by this Privacy Policy. We encourage visitors to review the privacy policy on each of these other websites before disclosing any personal information.

What information we collect

In the course of providing products or services to you or our client and performing due diligence checks in connection with our products or services (or discussing the possible products or services we might provide), we generally collect personal information about you. We also typically collect personal information about you when you visit or use our Website.

We typically collect or obtain your personal information because you give it to us (for example, in a form on our Website) or because other people give that information to us (for example, third party service providers that we use to help operate our Website or your employer where it receives products or services from BlackRock). We may also collect or obtain personal information from you because we observe or infer that information about you from the way you interact with us. For example, if you use our risk management platform, Aladdin, we will generally collect information about you in order to communicate updates to Aladdin functionality and general information about Aladdin. In order to improve your experience when you use this Website and to ensure that it is functioning effectively, we (or our service providers) also use cookies (small text files stored in a user’s browser) and web beacons (small graphic images that are placed on a website and used to monitor a user’s interaction with that website) which may collect personal information.

Additional information on how we use cookies and other tracking technologies and how you can control these can be found in our Cookies Policy, which is included at the end of this document.

The personal information that we may collect depends on the specific services, activities or products we undertake but typically includes: your name; age; date of birth; gender; home address; email address; telephone number; other contact details; country of residence; passport number and other national ID numbers; employment details (for example, the organization you work for, your job title); family circumstances (for example, your marital status where you enter it in a form on our Website or it appears in any documentation you provide to us); financial and tax related information (for example, your income, assets and tax residency where you enter such information in a form on our Website or it appears in any documentation that you provide to us); details of how you use any product or service provided by BlackRock; postings on any blogs, forums, wikis, and any other social media applications and services that we provide; IP address; browser and device type; user name that is used by you for one of our products or services; language; access times and duration; details of how you like to use our Website or the interactive products, tools, other technology or services we provide to you or our clients; websites that you visited before and after visiting our Website; details of how you like to interact with us, and similar information.

The types of personal information and ‘sensitive’ or ‘special categories’ of personal information that we collect will generally vary depending on the nature of the products and services that we provide to you and how you use our Website. In some cases, the ‘sensitive’ or ‘special categories’ of personal information that we collect include: your dietary requirements (for example, where we would like to provide you with lunch during a meeting); your health (for example, so that we can make reasonable accommodations for you in our buildings); your sexual orientation (for example, if you provide us with details of your spouse or partner); and any criminal convictions that you may have (for example, if this information is collected as part of ‘know your client’ and anti-money laundering checks that we must conduct before accepting you or your employer as a client).

In some rare circumstances, we will also gather other ‘special categories’ of personal information about you because you volunteer that data to us (for example, it appears in a copy of your resume/CV that you upload to our Website). In some other circumstances, the personal information we collect from you is needed to meet our legal or regulatory obligations or to provide you with the products or services requested by you or our client (who may be your employer). If so, we will indicate to you that the provision of this information is mandatory, and the consequences if we cannot collect this information.

In some cases, we will also collect personal information about you indirectly from third parties such as: (i) your employer where we provide it with products or services; (ii) third parties such as providers of ‘know your client’ and anti-money laundering services which we sometimes use to help us meet our legal requirements in this area and to help us verify your identity where we provide you or your employer with products or services; (iii) intermediaries (such as independent financial advisers); (iv) background check providers which we sometimes use to verify your identity when you apply for a job through our Website; (v) third party service providers that help us to operate our Website; and (vi) from publicly available sources such as business and employment oriented social networking services and jobs boards.

How we use information about you

Use of personal information to provide products and services

We will use your personal information to provide you or our client with products or services. As part of this, we may use your personal information in the course of correspondence relating to those products or services. Such correspondence may be with you, our client, other members of the BlackRock Group, our service providers or public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation.

In many cases, we also use your personal information to conduct due diligence checks in advance of providing products or services to you or our client, and to process an application from you or a prospective client to receive products or services from us. If you are referred to us by an intermediary or similar third party, we also typically use your personal information to assess whether to accept or reject your referral to BlackRock by that intermediary or similar third party.

Because we provide a wide range of products and services to our clients, the way in which we use personal information in relation to our products and services varies. For example, we use personal information about you when:

• you use our risk management platform, Aladdin
• we provide you or your employer with an insurance product or service
• you or your employer engage us to provide investment management or similar services 
• you privately invest in a fund product managed by a member of the BlackRock Group
• you engage a member of the BlackRock Group to provide investment management services
• you provide us with your personal information via email or a web form.

Use of personal information collected via our Website
We generally use your personal information collected via this Website:

• to manage and improve any services provided via our Website
• to manage and improve our Website (including by drawing up statistics on the usage of our Website)
• to tailor content of our Website to provide you with a more personalised experience and draw your attention to information about products and services that may be of interest to you
• to manage and respond to any request that you submit through our Website
• to help us learn more about you, the products and services that you or your employer receive from BlackRock, and other products and services that you or your employer might be interested in receiving
• to correspond with you in relation to services you use on our Website or information you provide via our Website. This correspondence is usually with you, other members of the BlackRock Group, our service providers, or public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation.

Use of personal information for other activities that form part of the operation of our business

We generally also use your personal information collected via this Website for the purposes of, or in connection with:
• applicable legal or regulatory requirements
• requests and communications from public or judicial authorities with the necessary authorisation
• financial accounting, invoicing and risk analysis purposes
• prudent operational management (including credit and risk management, insurance, audit, training and similar administrative purposes)
• client relationship purposes, which involve: (i) sending you BlackRock thought leadership or details of BlackRock products and services that we think might be of interest to you or your employer; (ii) contacting you to receive feedback on BlackRock products or services; and (iii) contacting you for other marketing or research purposes
• recruitment and business development purposes
• services we receive from our professional advisors, such as lawyers, accountants and consultants
• arrangements we have in place with intermediaries, brokers and other individuals and entities that partner with us
• considering, and entering into, any transaction involving part or all of the business or assets of the BlackRock Group
• protecting our rights and those of our clients
• meeting our corporate and social responsibilities.

The legal grounds we rely on for processing personal information

We are required by law to set out in this Privacy Policy the legal grounds on which we rely in order to process your personal information.

We generally use your personal information for the purposes outlined above because: (a) it is necessary for our legitimate interests and does not unduly affect your interests or fundamental rights and freedoms (see below); (b) it is necessary for legal and/or regulatory obligations or requests that we are subject to, such as keeping records for tax purposes or providing information to a public body or law enforcement agency; (c) it is necessary to perform contractual obligations that we owe towards you or our client, or to take pre-contractual steps at the request of you or our client; (d) it is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest (such as assisting with diversity in the workplace where you make contact through our Website in relation to job opportunities at BlackRock); or (e) in some cases, we have obtained your prior consent.

Examples of the ‘legitimate interests’ referenced above are: (i) to benefit from cost-effective services (for example, we may opt to use certain IT platforms offered by our service providers); (ii) to assess and verify any job application that you submit through the Website; (iii) to prevent fraud or criminal activity, misuses of our products and services, as well as the security of our IT systems, architecture and networks; (iv) to exercise our rights under Articles 16 and 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, including our freedom to conduct a business and right to property; and (v) to meet our corporate and social responsibility objectives.

To the extent that we process any sensitive personal information relating to you for any of the purposes outlined above, we will do so because either: (1) you have given us your explicit consent to process that information; (2) the processing is necessary for reasons of substantial public interest on the basis of applicable law (for example where we are required by law or regulatory requirements to process that information in order to ensure we meet our ‘know your client’ and ‘anti money laundering’ obligations); (3) the processing is necessary to carry out our obligations under employment, social security or social protection law; or (4) the processing is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defense of legal claims. The legal grounds for processing sensitive personal information outlined above at (1) to (4) appear at Articles 9(2)(a), 9(2)(g), 9(2)(b) and 9(2)(f) of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation respectively.

Where we are legally required to obtain your explicit consent to provide you with certain marketing materials, we will only provide you with such marketing materials where we have obtained such consent from you.

If you do not want to continue receiving any marketing materials from us, you can click on the unsubscribe function in the communication or e-mail groupprivacy@blackrock.com at any time.

To whom we disclose your information

In connection with one or more of the purposes outlined in the “How we use information about you” section above, we generally disclose details about you to: other members of the BlackRock Group; professional advisors and third parties that provide services to us and/or other members of the BlackRock Group (such as IT systems providers, platform providers, financial advisors, consultants (including lawyers and accountants), providers of HR and recruitment services and other goods and services providers (such as providers of marketing services where we are permitted to disclose your personal information to them); intermediaries, brokers, and other individuals and entities that partner with us; competent authorities (including any national and/or international regulatory or enforcement body or court or other form of tribunal, where we (or any other member of the BlackRock Group) are required to do so by applicable law or regulation at their request); a potential buyer, transferee, merger partner or seller and their advisers in connection with an actual or potential transfer or merger of part or all of BlackRock’s business or assets, or any associated rights or interests, or to acquire a business or enter into a merger with it; credit reference agencies or other organizations that help us detect criminal activity and incidence of fraud; and any central or local government department and other statutory or public bodies.

If you are an individual in the European Union, please note that some of the recipients of your personal information referenced above will be based in countries outside of the European Union whose laws may not provide the same level of data protection. Those countries typically include: the United States, Canada, Singapore, and India. In such cases, BlackRock will ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to protect your personal information that comply with our legal obligations. To ensure this level of protection for your personal information, BlackRock typically uses a data transfer agreement with the recipient based on standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission. A copy of these clauses is available here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/international-transfers/transfer/index_en.htm. Further details of the transfers of your personal information outside of the European Union and the adequate safeguards used by BlackRock in respect of such transfers (including copies of relevant agreements) are available from us by contacting groupprivacy@blackrock.com. You can also use this e-mail address to request further information about the entities that comprise the BlackRock Group and the countries in which they operate.

How long we keep your personal information

We will hold your personal information on BlackRock’s systems for as long as is necessary to fulfil the purpose for which it was collected or to comply with legal, regulatory or internal policy requirements.

Protection of your personal information

We use a range of physical, electronic and managerial measures to ensure that we keep your personal information secure, accurate and up to date. These measures include:

• education and training to relevant staff to ensure they are aware of our privacy obligations when handling personal information as well as training around social engineering, phishing, spear phishing, and password risks
• administrative and technical controls to restrict access to personal information on a ‘need to know’ basis
• technological security measures, including fire walls, encryption (industry standard SSL encryption with 128-bit key lengths), and anti-virus software
• physical security measures, such as staff security passes to access our premises.
• external technical assessments, security audits and vendor due diligence
• perimeter security: Firewalls, IDS, content filters
• segregation of networks: DMZ, corporate domain, production domain
• application security: OWASP top 10 focused code requirements, application testing, penetration testing
• endpoint security: Anti-virus, portable storage device lockdown, restricted administrative privileges
• Real-time monitoring of data leakage controls
• Layered and comprehensive cybersecurity defences
• Security incident reporting and management.

Although we use appropriate security measures once we have received your personal information, the transmission of data over the internet (including by e-mail) is never completely secure. We endeavour to protect personal information, but we cannot guarantee the security of data transmitted to us or by us.

Your rights and how to contact us

You have various rights in relation to your personal information. In particular, you have a right to:
• object to the processing or your personal information
• request a copy of personal information we hold about you
• ask that we update the personal information we hold about you, or correct such personal information that you think is incorrect or incomplete
• ask that we delete personal information that we hold about you, or restrict the way in which we use such personal information
• withdraw consent to our processing of your personal information (to the extent such processing is based on consent).

To exercise any of your rights, or if you have any other questions about our use of your personal information, please e-mail groupprivacy@blackrock.com or write to BlackRock’s Global Privacy and Data Protection Officer at 12 Throgmorton Avenue, London, EC2N 2DL, United Kingdom. You may also use these contact details if you wish to make a complaint to us relating to your privacy.

If you are unhappy with the way we handled your personal information or any privacy query or request that you have raised with us, you also have a right to complain to a data protection regulator in the place where you live or work, or in the place where you think an issue in relation to your data has arisen. A list of national data protection regulators can be found here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/dataprotection/bodies/authorities/index_en.htm.

Changes to this privacy statement

We may modify or amend this privacy statement from time to time.

Any future changes or additions to the processing of your personal data as described in this notice affecting you will be communicated to you through an appropriate channel, depending on how we normally communicate with you.

Cookies Policy

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are stored in your computer’s memory and hard drive, in your mobile device or tablet when you visit certain web pages. They are used to enable websites to function or to provide information to the owners of a website, or other third parties which receive data obtained from that website.

When you visit any web site, it may store or retrieve information on your browser, mostly in the form of cookies. This information might be about you, your preferences or your device and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to. The information does not usually directly identify you, but it can give you a more personalised web experience.

Why do we use cookies?

Cookies help us to provide customised services and information. We use cookies on our Website to tell us, in general terms, how and when pages on our Website are visited, what our users’ technology preferences are – such as what type of video player they use – and whether our Website is functioning properly. Depending on their purpose, some cookies will only operate for the length of a single browsing session, whilst others have a longer life span to ensure that they fulfil their longer-term purposes (as explained in more detail below). Please note that, however long the cookies’ active life may be, you can delete cookies (and therefore stop any further data collection by them) as further described below.

If you are using one of our password-protected sites, then the Website may use cookies or other technology to help us authenticate you, store and recognise your configuration and user attributes, facilitate your navigation of the website and customise its content so that the information made available is likely to be of more interest to you.

In broad terms, we use cookies on our Website for the following purposes:
• Analytical purposes: Analytical cookies allow us to recognise, measure and track visitors to our Website and compile a record of this usage information. This helps us to improve and develop the way our Website works, for example, by determining whether site visitors can find information easily, or by identifying the aspects of websites that are of the most interest to them.
• Usage preferences: Some of the cookies on our Website are activated when visitors to our sites make a choice about their usage of the site. Our Website then ‘remembers’ the settings preferences of the user concerned. This allows us to tailor aspects of our sites to the individual user.
• Terms and conditions: We use cookies on our Website in order to record when a site visitor has seen a policy, such as this one, or provided consent, such as consent to the terms and conditions on our Website. This helps to improve the user’s experience of the site – for example, it aids in avoiding a situation where a user is asked repeatedly to consent to the same terms. We also track whether a user has seen other similar documents (such as an online survey) before – again, to ensure that a user’s experience of our Website is a smooth one.
• Session management: The software that runs our Website uses cookies for technical purposes needed by the internal workings of our servers. For instance, we use cookies to distribute requests among multiple servers, to authenticate users, and to determine what features of the site they can access, verify the origin of requests, keep track of information about a user’s session and determine which options or pages to display in order for the site to function.
• Functional purposes: Functional purpose cookies store information that is needed by our applications to process and operate. For example, where transactions or requests within an application involve multiple workflow stages, cookies are used to store the information from each stage temporarily, in order to facilitate completion of the overall transaction or request.
• Advertising: Advertising cookies allow us (or third parties) to monitor the behaviour of users of our Website. This information is used to ensure that products and services highlighted to those individuals are targeted in a focused and relevant manner – e.g. through advertisements on BlackRock websites or through advertisements on third party websites (e.g., Bloomberg, Agefi.com, Handlesblatt.de, etc) which are based on your experience with our Website; or to monitor the effectiveness of those digital marketing campaigns. We also monitor whether the adverts displayed on our Website are of interest to users and retain this information to ensure that adverts seen by users of our Website over a period of time are appropriate.

Please note that third parties may use cookies. The kind of cookies and the consequent data processing carried out by such third parties are regulated by their privacy policies. Please see below for more information about third party cookies.

Your cookie preferences

Cookies are necessary in order for you to be able to make full use of BlackRock’s Website. In addition, cookies help us provide you with personalised features on our Website. If you chose to disable cookies, some of BlackRock’s Website’s functionality might be impaired.

Local Flash Storage

On certain pages of our Website, we include content designed for display using Adobe Flash Player, such as animations, videos and tools. Local flash storage (often referred to as “Flash cookies”) can be used to help improve your experience as a user. Flash storage is retained on your device in much the same way as standard cookies, but is managed directly by your Flash software.

If you wish to disable or delete information stored locally in Flash, please see the documentation for your Flash software, located at www.adobe.com. Please note that, if you disable Flash cookies, some site functionality may not work.

Third party cookies

When you visit our Website, you may receive cookies that are set by third parties. These may include cookies set by Google, Bizo, LinkedIn, AppNexus, Xaxis, MediaMind and/or Rocketfuel. These cookies are used for the purposes described in the “Why Do We Use Cookies?” section of this policy. We do not control the setting of these third party cookies, so we suggest you might wish to check the third party websites for more information about their use of cookies and how to manage them.

Amending cookie preferences

If you wish to remove cookies set by our Website from your browser in the future, you may delete them. The instructions for removing cookies from your computer or mobile device depend on the operating system and web browser you use. Please note, however, that withdrawing your agreement to the use of cookies on our sites will impair the functionality of the sites.

 The site www.allaboutcookies.org includes instructions for managing cookies on many commonly used browses, or you may consult the vendor documentation for your specific software.

Further information about cookies

If you would like to find out more about cookies in general and how to manage them, please visit www.allaboutcookies.org.