Payhawk MCP Connector Privacy Notice

Last updated 21 October 2026

This notice covers the Payhawk connector for AI assistants, including ChatGPT and Claude. It explains what the connector can reach in your Payhawk account, where that data goes, how long anything is kept, and how to switch it off. Read it before you authorise the connection.

AT A GLANCE


What it does	Lets an AI assistant read and act on your Payhawk data on your behalf, using your own Payhawk permissions. It adds no permissions you do not already have.
Who switches it on	You do, with your normal Payhawk login. No administrator approval is needed and it does not depend on your role. Your administrator controls whether the AI agent tools are available for an entity.
What leaves Payhawk	Whatever a tool returns in answer to your request: expenses, cards by last four digits, suppliers, documents, people in your account, approvals and audit records.
Where it goes	To the AI assistant you connected, handled under that provider's own terms. Some requests also use AI inside Payhawk, which Payhawk runs in the European Union.
What Payhawk keeps	No new copy of your records. The connection, a call log for 365 days, and usage analytics.
Model training	Payhawk does not use your data to train or improve AI models. What the assistant provider does is governed by its own terms.
How to stop it	Disconnect in the assistant, or revoke the connection in Payhawk. Access ends immediately.
Questions	dpo@payhawk.com

1. What this notice covers

Payhawk publishes a connector, built on the Model Context Protocol, that lets an AI assistant work with your Payhawk account. This notice describes only that connector. Payhawk's processing of personal data generally is described in the Payhawk Privacy Policy at payhawk.com/privacy, and the terms between Payhawk and your employer are in the Data Processing Addendum at payhawk.com/dpa.

Where this notice says you, it means the person using the assistant. Where it says your employer, it means the company that holds the Payhawk account.

2. How the connection works, and who is responsible

You connect the assistant to Payhawk using OAuth. You sign in to Payhawk and grant access. From then on, when you ask the assistant something about your spend, it calls a Payhawk tool, and the tool runs with the permissions your Payhawk user already has. If you cannot see a card or an invoice in Payhawk, the assistant cannot see it either. Actions that change data are previewed first and take effect only when you confirm them.

Three parties are involved, and they are not responsible for the same things.

Your employer	Payhawk	The AI provider
Controller	Processor	Independent recipient
Decides whether the connector is used at all and for what.	Runs the connector on your employer's instructions. Does not decide what the data is used for.	Not a Payhawk Sub-Processor. Handles what it receives under its own terms with you or your employer.

Who switches the connector on

Any Payhawk user can connect the connector on their own, using their normal Payhawk login. No administrator approval is needed and it does not depend on your role. What your role does control is what you can see: the connector never returns anything your existing Payhawk permissions do not already allow. The one administrator control is a per-entity toggle for the AI agent tools, which switches those specific tools on or off for an entity.

3. What the connector can access

The connector offers a variety of tools. Each one returns only what is needed to answer the request you made, and the connector does not sweep your account. The categories below are what a tool can return, and therefore what can reach the assistant.

Can leave Payhawk

Expenses and transactions: Amount, currency, date, merchant, category, tax rate, notes, status, who submitted and who approved.
Cards: Cardholder name, last four digits, spend limits and card status.
Receipts and invoices: Uploaded documents and the details read from them. These are written by third parties and can contain personal data of people outside your company.
Suppliers: Supplier name and tax identifier. Looking up one supplier also returns its contact name, email address and telephone number where recorded. Listing suppliers in bulk deliberately omits contact details.
People in your account: Name, work email address, role, team, department, manager and cost centre.
Approvals, comments, audit records: Who did what and when, including comment text and approval history.
Travel and procurement requests: Where your employer uses those features: traveller name, trip and booking details, purchase requests.
Reports and summaries: Aggregated spend figures, budget positions and trends built from the above.

Never leaves Payhawk

Full card numbers: No tool returns a full card number, CVV or PIN. Cards appear by last four digits only.
Passwords and credentials: No tool returns a password, API key or authentication token.
Identity verification files: Passports, national ID documents and other onboarding verification material are not reachable through the connector.
Anything above your permissions: Every call is scoped to your own Payhawk user. The assistant cannot read another person's data that you cannot read yourself.

4. Why the data is used

To answer what you asked. A tool runs, returns the relevant records, and the assistant uses them to reply to you.
To carry out an action you confirmed. For example coding an expense, marking an invoice paid, or updating a supplier. You see a preview and confirm before anything changes.
To keep an audit trail. Payhawk records that a connector call happened, so your employer can see what was done through the connector and by whom.
To keep the service secure. Detecting abuse, misuse and unauthorised access.

Payhawk does not use data reached through the connector for advertising, for profiling you, or to train or improve any AI model.

5. Who receives the data

The AI provider you connected

Everything a tool returns is transmitted to the assistant you connected, and from that point it is held and processed by that provider under its own terms and privacy policy. The AI provider is not acting for Payhawk and is not one of Payhawk's Sub-Processors for this purpose. Payhawk cannot control how long that provider keeps the data, whether it is reviewed by people, or whether it is used to improve that provider's services. Please read that provider's own privacy terms before connecting.

AI providers working for Payhawk

Some requests are answered with help from AI running inside Payhawk, and those providers are a different kind of third party: they act for Payhawk under contract, on your employer's instructions, and they are not free to use the data for their own purposes.

Google Cloud (Vertex AI, Gemini models) powers agents. Payhawk runs these calls in European Union regions.
Document reading. Uploading a receipt or invoice through the connector runs the same text extraction Payhawk uses inside the app.

Every other tool call reaches no AI provider at all. Note that Claude can appear in two different roles. If Claude is the assistant you connected, Anthropic receives what the tools return as an independent recipient. Separately, Payhawk uses Claude models for product help and analytics, but those models run inside Google Vertex AI in the European Union: Google Cloud processes that data as Payhawk's Sub-Processor, and it is not sent to Anthropic. Those are separate relationships under separate terms.

Everyone else

Payhawk does not sell data reached through the connector and does not share it with anyone for their own purposes. Payhawk's own Sub-Processors, listed in Schedule 2 of the Data Processing Addendum, may process it as part of running the Payhawk platform.

6. Where the data is processed

Payhawk operates the connector from data centres in the European Union, in Belgium and Germany, and that is where your records are held. Payhawk also runs the connector's AI processing in the European Union: the three task agents on Google Vertex AI in European Union regions, and product help and analytics on Claude via Vertex AI in the European Union.

Your administrator can switch the AI agent tools off for an entity, which removes the Payhawk-side agent processing altogether.

7. How long anything is kept

The connector creates no new store of your records. It reads and writes the data already in your Payhawk account, so for the records themselves nothing changes: they are kept for as long as your employer's agreement with Payhawk provides. What the connector adds is the following.

WHAT	HOW LONG
Your authorisation to the assistant	Expires 30 days after you last use it, and renews for as long as you keep using it. You can revoke it at any time, and it ends immediately when you do.
Access tokens	Short-lived. They expire within hours and are reissued while the authorisation is valid.
Log of connector calls	365 days.
Usage analytics	Pseudonymised records of how the connector is used, retained for 24 months.
AI traces	Where a task agent, product help or analytics answer runs on AI, the request and its trace are recorded and kept for up to 30 days.
Agent memory	The details a task agent remembers about you between conversations. Kept until it is deleted. You can ask the agent to forget something at any time.
Data held by the assistant provider	Set by that provider under its own terms. Payhawk has no control over it.

8. What you can control

Do not connect. The connector does nothing until you authorise it.
Confirm or refuse each action. Any tool that changes data shows you what it will do and stops there until you confirm.
Disconnect at any time. Remove the connector in your assistant, or revoke the connection in Payhawk. Access ends at once and no further data can be read.
Ask the agent to forget. Where a task agent remembers details about you between conversations, you can ask it to forget something at any time.
Delete what the assistant holds. Data already sent to the assistant sits in that provider's service. Delete the conversation there, or use that provider's own controls.
Exercise your data protection rights. Your employer is the controller, so requests to access, correct or erase your personal data go to your employer. Payhawk assists your employer with them.

9. Security

Connections use OAuth 2.0. Traffic is encrypted in transit and data is encrypted at rest. Every call is scoped to the permissions of the Payhawk user who authorised it and is logged. Write actions require an explicit confirmation step.

10. Please do not put sensitive documents through the connector

Read this before using the connector on receipts
Receipts and invoices are written by other people and sometimes carry information neither you nor Payhawk expected, for example a pharmacy or medical receipt that reveals something about someone's health. Both AI providers restrict this kind of data, and Payhawk's agreement with your employer asks that special category data is not uploaded to the platform. Avoid asking the assistant to fetch or read documents you know contain health information, and raise anything you are unsure about with your finance team.

Read this before using the connector on receipts

Receipts and invoices are written by other people and sometimes carry information neither you nor Payhawk expected, for example a pharmacy or medical receipt that reveals something about someone's health. Both AI providers restrict this kind of data, and Payhawk's agreement with your employer asks that special category data is not uploaded to the platform. Avoid asking the assistant to fetch or read documents you know contain health information, and raise anything you are unsure about with your finance team.

11. Changes and contact

This notice is dated at the top of the page. Where a change materially affects what the connector does with personal data, Payhawk will update it before the change takes effect.