Effective date: 2026-04-24
Last updated: 2026-04-24

1. About this notice

Rent-Ready is an optional step in the Varden rental application. If you choose it, you connect your checking account through Stripe Financial Connections so we can help a landlord see that you have steady income and can pay rent on time. This notice explains what that involves, what we do with the data, and the rights you have over it.

Rent-Ready is separate from a credit report. Varden is not a credit bureau, and the information here is only used for the specific application you start it from. For the broader picture of how Varden handles your data, see our Privacy Policy.

2. What we collect through Stripe Financial Connections

When you connect your bank, Stripe asks you to sign in to your bank and pick the checking account you want to share. You sign in with your bank, not with Varden. We never see or store your bank username or password. Stripe gives us a one-time, read-only look at the account you chose.

From that one-time read, Varden receives:

• The account holder name on file at your bank
• The last four digits of the account number and the bank name
• Current and available balances on that account
• Up to 60 to 90 days of transaction history on that account

We do not receive your full account number, your online-banking credentials, or access to move money. The connection is for reading, not for paying.

3. What we derive and what we discard

Right after the one-time read, Varden turns the raw data into a short set of signals that tell the story of the account without keeping the transactions themselves. These signals are the only things we keep long term:

• Whether regular deposits look like income, and how steady those deposits are
• Whether there is a regular outflow that looks like rent
• The number of overdrafts or non-sufficient-funds events during the window
• A rough cushion figure based on balance versus typical monthly outflows
• A debt-service ratio estimate
• A single Varden bank score that summarizes those signals for the landlord

Once the signals and score are saved to your application, Varden discards the raw transaction list. We do not keep your statement-level history, merchant names, or individual purchases. We also never store your bank login, and Stripe does not share it with us.

4. Who sees the verification

The Varden bank score and the signals above are shown only to the landlord of the specific listing you applied to. They appear inside that application, next to the rest of your application. Nobody else on Varden sees them, and Varden does not sell, share, or furnish them to credit bureaus, other landlords, insurers, employers, or any third party.

If you apply to another listing later, Rent-Ready does not carry over. You choose whether to run it again for that new application.

5. How we protect it

Varden follows the Federal Trade Commission Safeguards Rule under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (16 CFR Part 314) for this data. In plain terms:

• Data is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2 or higher and encrypted at rest
• Access is role-based and limited to staff who need it to operate the product
• We log access and keep audit trails for the Rent-Ready records
• We have a written incident response plan and will notify affected applicants if a breach meets applicable legal thresholds
• Our third-party providers, including Stripe, are vetted and bound by contract

No system is perfect, but we take these duties seriously and keep revisiting them as the product grows.

6. Your rights

You are in charge of this data. At any time you can:

• Access it: ask us for a copy of the signals and score we derived from your connection
• Correct it: tell us if something looks wrong so we can review and fix it
• Delete it: ask us to remove the Rent-Ready signals and score from your application
• Withdraw consent: disconnect Rent-Ready from your account settings, or by emailing us. Withdrawing stops any future reads and removes the derived data from the application you linked it to

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under state privacy laws, including the ones described in our CCPA Notice. To exercise any of these, email privacy@vardenhomes.com. We verify identity before acting on a request and reply within the time required by applicable law.

7. Retention and deletion

Raw transactions and balances from the one-time read are discarded as soon as we finish deriving the signals. We keep the signals and the Varden bank score for as long as the application they are attached to is active, plus a short period after the application is closed so landlords can finish their decision and so we can support audits and dispute handling.

Unless a law requires a longer hold, Rent-Ready derived data is deleted no later than twenty-four months after the application is closed. You can ask us to delete it earlier at any time.

8. Service providers

Stripe, Inc. is the service provider that runs Financial Connections. Stripe acts as a data processor on Varden's behalf for this flow and is contractually limited to using the data to provide the service. Stripe also has its own privacy notice that covers its role.

Varden does not let any other third party read the Rent-Ready data for their own purposes. Our hosting and infrastructure providers may touch the data in order to store or transmit it, but they are bound by the same Safeguards Rule duties and cannot use it for their own marketing or analytics.

9. Changes to this notice

If we change Rent-Ready or the way we handle this data, we will update this page and move the "Last updated" date. If the change is material, we will also send a notice to the email on your Varden account before the change takes effect.

10. Contact

Questions about this notice, or a request about your Rent-Ready data, can go to our privacy team.