Site Cookie Policy

Below is information about how Bank of London ("we") use cookies and other similar technology on this website.

1. OVERVIEW

Our Website Cookie Policy should be read in conjunction with our Privacy Policy. We will update both policies from time to time and we encourage you to check them frequently.

Your privacy is important to us and we currently only use a small number of cookies with the main purpose of continuously improve our your browsing experience on our Website. Some of those cookies are also essential for our website’s basic functionality: we call them for this reason “Essential cookies”. Other cookies are not essential for your browsing experience but we use them to gather anonymous statistics, useful for us to understand how our visitors use the website (e.g. which pages are visited the most, where the users are more likely to land when coming from another website).

We can place cookies and other similar technology on your device, including mobile device, in accordance with your preferences set on our Cookie Consent Manager, which you can easily access by clicking the icon below, shown near the bottom left of the web page where you land.

The cookie manager window allows you to determine which categories of cookies you are willing to accept in your browser.

2. WHAT ARE COOKIES?

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded and stored into your computer or mobile device browser when you visit a Website, allowing it to later recognise your device as one which has previously visited. Several Types of cookies exist, such as:

  • First-party cookies: Set by the website you’re visiting directly.
  • Third-party cookies: Set by domains other than the one you’re visiting.
  • Session cookies: Temporary, deleted when you close the browser.
  • Persistent cookies: Remain on the device until they expire or are deleted manually.

Cookies managed exclusively by Bank of London only are called “first party cookies”, whereas cookies from third parties (e.g. Google) are called “third party cookies”.

Another important distinction should be made between “Essential” and “Non-Essential” cookies.

Essential cookies: these are cookies without which our website cannot function as intended. They help you access our website and each of its web pages by enabling basic functions like setting cookies. You may disable these by changing your browser settings to reject all cookies, but this may affect how the website functions and ultimately your browsing experience.

Non-essential cookies: we need your consent to hold and use these. For example, we use a third party service, PostHog, that helps assess the behavioural patterns on our website. By collecting visitors’ internet log information (such as IP address and type of browser) we can track the number of visits to each section of our website. This helps us improve the design of our website and its functionality. Please note, we do not make any attempt to find out the identities or nature of those visiting our website.

3. WHY DO WE USE COOKIES AND SIMILAR TECHNOLOGIES?

Cookies are used for several purposes, such as letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences and generally improving the user experience. Typical Purposes for using cookies are:

  • Session management: Keep you logged in the restricted area of the website, only accessible when you click on “Login”.
  • Personalization: Save preferences like language or theme.
  • Tracking: Record browsing behaviour for analytics or advertising purposes. We will need your consent to store this type of cookies in your browser.

4. WHAT COOKIES DO WE USE AND HOW CAN YOU MANAGE THEM?

We currently use a number of cookies to continuously improve our website and your browsing experience.

The cookie manager window lists 4 broad categories of cookies, of which only one is mandatory while for all the others you can elect to consent us to store them on your browser or not. By default, by which we mean if you do not take any action, your preference will be set to only accept essential cookies. By reaching the cookie manager pop-up window you can modify this selection anytime, however acceptance of essential cookies can only be disabled through your browser settings.

When you click on the “Change your consent” button, you can see all the cookies we use within each of the 4 categories described below:

NECESSARY: Necessary cookies help make a website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies.

PREFERENCES: Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.

STATISTICS (sometimes also referred as “ANALYTICS”): Statistic cookies help website owners to understand how visitors interact with websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously.

MARKETING: Marketing cookies are used to track visitors across websites. The intention is to display ads that are relevant and engaging for the individual user and thereby more valuable for publishers and third party advertisers.

You can manage your cookie preferences by selecting:

ACCEPT ALL: this selection means you are consenting to receive and store in your web browser all the cookies we use.

DENY: with this selection you are keeping the default setting of accepting only the cookies in the “Necessary” category.

ALLOW SELECTION: with this selection you are accepting only the cookies listed in the categories selected with a blue on/off button. In the example below, you are only accepting the 22 cookies listed under the Necessary and the 16 cookies in the Statistics categories.

5. OUR THIRD PARTY COOKIES

Session and persistent cookies can be either first- or third-party cookies. A first-party cookie is set by us, whilst a third-party cookie is provided by a third party we are using to provide a particular service.

The list below summaries all the cookies that we use.

Cookie Preferences (CookieConsent)

  • Type: Essential, third-party, persistent.
  • Description: This cookie is set by our website because we use CookieBot, our cookie law compliance solution. It is set after you have seen a cookie information notice and only when you actively close the notice down. It enables our website not to show the message more than once.  This cookie is required by the IAB Europe Transparency & Consent Framework to store the user's consent.
  • Retention period: The cookie has a 90-day lifespan and contains no personal information.

Cookie Preferences (Cookiesession1)

  • Type: Essential, third-party, persistent.
  • Description: This cookie is also set by the cookie compliance solution from Cookiebot. It stores information about the categories of cookies the site uses and whether you have given or withdrawn consent for the use of each category. This enables us to prevent cookies in analytics categories from being set in the users browser, when consent is not given. It contains no information that can identify the site visitor.
  • Retention period: The cookie has a 90-day lifespan, so that returning visitors to the site will have their preferences remembered.

reCaptcha (_GRECAPTCHA)

  • Type: Essential, third-party, session.
  • Description: This cookie is set by our website because we use reCaptcha by Google to prevent automated attacks against our site.
  • Retention period: The cookie has a less than one day, session only lifespan.

DataDog (_dd_s)

  • Type: Non-essential, Third-party performance (analytics), session.
  • Description: This cookie is associated with DataDog and is used to distinguish unique users’ session and campaign data for the sites analytics reports.
  • Retention period: The cookie has a less than 4 hour, session only lifespan, so that analytics for that session can be captured.

DataDog (dd_site_test_*)

  • Type: Non-essential, Third-party performance (analytics), session.
  • Description: This cookie is associated with DataDog and is used to test the browser for cookie support.
  • Retention period: The cookie expires instantly once the testing is complete.

DataDog (dd_cookie_test_*)

  • Type: Non-essential, Third-party performance (analytics), session.
  • Description: This cookie is associated with DataDog and is used to test the browser for cookie support.
  • Retention period: The cookie expires instantly once the testing is complete.

Google Analytics (_ga)

  • Type: Non-essential, Third-party performance (analytics), persistent.
  • Description: This cookie is associated with Google Analytics and is used to distinguish users who visit our site.
  • Retention Period: The cookie has a retention period of 2 years.

Google Analytics (_ga_VXCPEW7T5X)

  • Type: Non-essential, Third-party performance (analytics), persistent.
  • Description: This cookie is associated with Google Analytics and is used to persist session state.
  • Retention Period: The cookie has a retention period of 2 years.

HubSpot Analytics (__cf_bm)

  • Type: Essential, third-party, session.
  • Description: This cookie is set by HubSpot's CDN provider and is a necessary cookie for bot protection. Learn more about Cloudflare cookies.
  • Retention Period: This cookie has a retention period of 30 minutes.

HubSpot Analytics (__hstc)

  • Type: Non-essential, third-party, persistent,
  • Description: The main cookie for tracking visitors through HubSpot. It contains the domain, hubspotutk, initial timestamp (first visit), last timestamp (last visit), current timestamp (this visit), and session number (increments for each subsequent session).
  • Retention Period: This cookie has a retention period of 6 months.

HubSpot Analytics (hubspotutk)

  • Type: Non-essential, third-party, persistent.
  • Description: This cookie keeps track of a visitor's identity. It is passed to HubSpot on form submission and used when deduplicating contacts. It contains an opaque GUID to represent the current visitor.
  • Retention Period: This cookie has a retention period of 6 months.

HubSpot Analytics (__hssc)

  • Type: Non-essential, third-party, session.
  • Description: This cookie keeps track of sessions. This is used to determine if HubSpot should increment the session number and timestamps in the __hstc cookie. It contains the domain, viewCount (increments each pageView in a session), and session start timestamp.
  • Retention Period: This cookie has a retention period of 30 minutes.

HubSpot Analytics (__hssrc)

  • Type: Non-essential, third-party, session.
  • Description: Whenever HubSpot changes the session cookie, this cookie is also set to determine if the visitor has restarted their browser. If this cookie does not exist when HubSpot manages cookies, it is considered a new session. It contains the value "1" when present.
  • Retention Period: This cookie expires at the end of the session.

PostHog Analytics (ph_phc_*)

  • Type: Non-essential, third-party, persistent.
  • Description: This cookie is set by PostHog, a third-party analytics company we use to better understand how users are using our website and products. It stores a "distinct ID" that we use to identify you as well as a session ID.
  • Retention Period: This cookie has a retention period of 7 days.

NextAuth.js (__Host-next-auth.csrf-token)

  • Type: Essential, first-party, session.
  • Description: Used for security purposes, specifically to prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. It ensures that every request made by a logged-in user is coming from the authenticated user.
  • Retention Period: The cookie expires at the end of the session.

NextAuth.js (__Secure-next-auth.callback-url)

  • Type: Non-essential, first-party, session.
  • Description: Used to store the URL to which a user will be redirected after authenticating with an authentication provider. It ensures a seamless user experience by redirecting the user to the intended page post-login.
  • Retention Period: The cookie expires at the end of the session.

LexisNexis (thx_guid)

  • Type: Non-essential, third-party, persistent.
  • Description: This allows unique identification of a device (PC, telephone, etc.) used to place orders on this website for subsequent analysis.
  • Retention Period: This cookie has a retention period of 1 year.

Cloudflare (_cfuvid)

  • Type: Essential, first-party, session.
  • Description: Used for purposes of tracking users across sessions to optimise user experience by maintaining session consistency and providing personalised services.
  • Retention Period: This cookie expires at the end of the session.

ThreatMetrix (tmx-guid)

  • Type: Non-essential, third-party, persistent.
  • Description: Used to uniquely identify a browser/device or session when assessing risk.
  • Retention Period: This cookie has a retention period of 1 year.

We regularly audit our cookie usage to ensure that we have a full list and share accurate information with you in this policy. However, it is possible we may have missed one from our list above. If you happen to find another that is being set on our site, please let us know.

6. MANAGING COOKIES THROUGH YOUR BROWSER

Most web browsers allow you to control cookies through their settings. You can usually configure your browser to:

  • Accept or reject all cookies.
  • Delete cookies already stored on your device.
  • Receive a notification before a cookie is set.

The method for doing this varies by browser. For more details, you can use the following official support pages:

Please note that disabling or deleting cookies may impact the functionality of our website and limit certain features.

You can find more information about cookies, including how to control the use of these through your browser settings, at www.allaboutcookies.org or www.aboutcookies.org.

7. UPDATES TO THIS POLICY

We may revise our cookie policy at any time by amending this page. Please check it from time to time and take notice of any changes we have made.

Last updated: 3 October 2025