Before you deposit a penny, here is exactly what happens to it

When you fund a milestone, the money does not come to Track My Build's own bank account and it does not go to your builder. It is collected and held by Stripe Payments UK, Ltd., our regulated payment provider, in a balance attached to your project.

We can instruct a payout to your builder only when you have approved the milestone. We cannot spend, borrow against, or withdraw your funds for our own use at any point.

Safeguarding means customer money is kept separate from the operating money of the business handling it, so it cannot be used to pay that business's costs or creditors.

Your milestone funds are held by Stripe under its own regulatory permissions, separate from Track My Build's company accounts. If Track My Build ceased trading tomorrow, unreleased milestone funds would not form part of our assets — they would be returned to the homeowners who deposited them, or paid to builders for milestones already approved.

All card and bank payments, holding of funds, builder onboarding checks and payouts run on Stripe Connect. Stripe is PCI DSS Level 1 certified — the highest level in the card industry — and is used by millions of businesses worldwide.

Card details are entered directly into Stripe's hosted checkout and are never seen, transmitted, or stored by Track My Build's servers. We store only a payment reference so we can show you a receipt.

No builder can receive a single penny until they have completed identity and business verification through Stripe: government photo ID, date of birth, home or trading address, and — for limited companies — Companies House registration and director details.

Bank account ownership is verified before payouts are enabled. If verification fails or documents expire, payouts are automatically blocked and the builder's project pages show an unverified status to the homeowner.

Homeowners complete a short onboarding: verified email address, name, contact number and the property address the work relates to. Payments are additionally screened by Stripe for fraud and 3-D Secure authentication with your bank.

Verification status for both parties is shown openly in the project's Trust Centre, so each side can see exactly who they are dealing with — without ever seeing the other party's private documents.

The platform runs on managed infrastructure with row-level database security: every query is checked against your identity, so a homeowner can only ever read their own projects and a builder only theirs. Financial fields are write-protected at database level and can be changed only by verified server operations.

Uploaded documents and photos live in a private storage vault. Files are served through short-lived signed links, so a URL cannot be shared or guessed to expose your paperwork.

All traffic to and from the platform is encrypted in transit with TLS 1.2 or higher, with HTTPS enforced. Data at rest — database records, documents and photos — is encrypted with AES-256.

Passwords are never stored in readable form. Sign-in is handled by our authentication provider using industry-standard hashing, and you can sign in with Google if you would prefer not to hold another password.

Track My Build Ltd is NOT authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. We do not hold client money ourselves, we are not a bank, we do not offer credit, insurance or investment products, and deposits are not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS).

Regulated payment activity — collecting your payment, holding the funds and paying out your builder — is performed by Stripe Payments UK, Ltd., which is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011 (firm reference number 900461) for the issuing of electronic money and provision of payment services.

Anyone telling you Track My Build is "FCA-backed" or "FCA regulated" would be wrong, including us. Our protection comes from how the flow is built — milestone-by-milestone funding, your approval before release, and a regulated provider holding the money in between.