Legal
Terms of use
The terms on which this website and its free tools are offered.
1. Who we are
This website is operated by Northward Compliance & Risk Services Inc., a corporation incorporated under the Canada Business Corporations Act, with its registered office at 2627 McCowan Road, Unit 1901, Toronto, Ontario M1S 5T1, Canada ("Northward", "we", "us").
You can reach us at hello@northwardcompliance.com
2. These terms
By using this website you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the site.
If you use the site on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms on its behalf, and "you" means that organisation.
3. What this site offers
The site provides information about Northward, a free risk assessment tool, a free sanctions screening check, guides, a regulatory news page, and a Regulatory Risk & Compliance Agent.
These are offered free of charge and for business use.
4. Nothing here is advice
Our tools, guides and Agent do not provide legal, regulatory, investment or professional advice.
They do not make compliance decisions for you, and they do not certify that you comply with anything.
Responsibility for any decision remains with the regulated business making it.
What each tool does, and what it does not do, is set out at /legal-disclaimer, which forms part of these terms.
5. Who may use the site
You must be at least 18 and using the site for business purposes.
The free tools are intended for regulated businesses and their advisers, not for consumers.
6. Information you give us
You must give accurate information when you use a tool, request a guide, or contact us.
Each free trial is limited to one per organisation. The risk assessment and the screening check are counted separately, so one organisation may take one of each. You must not create additional submissions, use alternative email addresses or domains, or take any other step to obtain more than that.
You confirm you have the right to submit any information you enter, including any information about another person.
You must not enter confidential, sensitive or personal information into the Agent.
7. Acceptable use
You must not:
- (a) use the site or any tool unlawfully, or to breach any sanctions, export control or privacy law;
- (b) access the site by automated means, including scraping, crawling or bulk download, except by a search engine obeying our robots file;
- (c) attempt to circumvent any usage limit, rate limit or access control;
- (d) copy, extract, index or redistribute our content, our guides, our regulatory source material or any output, other than for your own internal business use;
- (e) use our content or any output to train, fine-tune or evaluate any machine learning model;
- (f) reverse engineer, decompile, benchmark or attempt to derive our methodologies, scoring models or the contents of our regulatory corpus, whether from outputs, from the site, or otherwise;
- (g) interfere with the operation or security of the site, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of it; or
- (h) resell or otherwise commercially exploit the free tools or their output.
8. The Agent
This section covers the Agent on this website. The Regulatory Agent inside the Northward Compliance Suite is a separate service, provided to clients under a separate agreement, and these terms do not apply to it.
The Agent answers from a fixed set of published regulatory sources and gives a citation for every statement it makes.
It can still be wrong. It can miss a provision, misread one, or answer a narrower question than you asked.
Check the source it cites before relying on anything it says.
It is a research aid, not a determination, and nothing it returns obliges you to act one way or the other.
Your questions are not used to train any artificial intelligence model, ours or anyone else's. We keep them for 12 months, as set out in our privacy policy, and we record no identifier alongside them, so two questions from the same person cannot be connected.
9. The screening check
The screening check covers the sanctions lists named on our Screening page.
Our politically exposed person check is advisory and drawn from public datasets. It is not a licensed commercial database and it is not comprehensive.
Our adverse media check is a signal drawn from open news sources. It is not an exhaustive or licensed media feed.
A result showing no match is not a guarantee that no match exists.
10. Our intellectual property
All content on this site, including text, guides, designs, software, our regulatory corpus, our methodologies and our scoring models, belongs to Northward or our licensors.
We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive licence to view the site and to use the output of a free tool for your own internal business purposes.
We grant you no other right. In particular, nothing on this site transfers ownership of, or any licence to, our methodologies, scoring models or corpus.
Third party material reproduced on this site, including published regulatory text, remains the property of its owner.
11. Information you submit
You keep ownership of information you submit.
You grant us a licence to use it to operate the site, provide the tool you asked for, respond to you, and improve our services.
How we handle personal information is set out in our Privacy Policy at /legal-privacy.
12. Availability
The free tools are provided as they are and as available.
We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the site or any tool at any time, without notice and without liability.
We do not promise the site will be available, uninterrupted or error free.
13. No warranty
To the fullest extent permitted by law, we exclude all warranties, conditions and representations in respect of the site and the free tools, whether express or implied, including as to accuracy, completeness, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.
14. Our liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for:
- (a) any loss arising from your use of, or reliance on, the site, a free tool, a guide, the Agent or any output;
- (b) any regulatory finding, penalty, enforcement action or remediation cost;
- (c) any loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill, opportunity or anticipated saving; or
- (d) any indirect or consequential loss.
Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total liability arising out of or in connection with these terms and your use of the site is limited to one hundred Canadian dollars (CAD $100).
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.
15. Suspension
We may suspend or block your access to the site or any tool at any time, including where we believe these terms have been breached.
16. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. The version published on this page applies to your use of the site, and the date it was last updated is shown at the top.
17. Links
The site may link to third party websites. We do not control them and are not responsible for them.
18. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable in it.
You and we submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Ontario.
19. General
If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.
These terms, together with our Privacy Policy and our Disclaimer, are the entire agreement between us in respect of your use of the site.