Confidentiality & Trust
Pellere is engaged at moments of consequence. What our clients share with us, and how we handle it, is the foundation of everything that follows.
Confidentiality & trust posture
Strategy work happens in the open spaces of an organization. The questions a founder cannot yet ask their board. The numbers that have not been shared with the team. The pivot that may or may not happen. Pellere is engaged at exactly these moments, and our entire operating posture is built around protecting them.
Engagement confidentiality
Everything you share with us in the course of an engagement — conversations, documents, decisions, deliverables, the existence of the engagement itself — is treated as confidential. Confidentiality survives the conclusion of the engagement and is not contingent on a separate non-disclosure agreement; it is the default. We are happy to execute a mutual NDA on request, and we will sign your standard form without negotiation in most cases.
What confidentiality means in practice
- We do not disclose client identities, engagement scope, or engagement outcomes without written permission.
- We do not use client work product, methodologies, or proprietary information in other client engagements.
- We do not reference current or former clients in marketing, pitch materials, case studies, social content, or speaking engagements without explicit written approval of the specific use.
- Where a case study or testimonial is approved, we agree wording in advance and you retain the right to revoke at any time.
Conflicts of interest
Before accepting an engagement, we review our active and recent client roster for conflicts. If we identify a direct competitive conflict, we will disclose it and decline the engagement, or propose a structured arrangement (information barriers, separate teams, time-bound exclusivity) that addresses the conflict to your satisfaction. We will not represent both sides of an active transaction or dispute.
Data segregation
Each engagement is held in a dedicated, access-controlled workspace. Client materials are not commingled. When an engagement concludes, materials are archived under retention rules described in Section 4 of this page, and access is reduced accordingly.
Personnel
Every person engaged on a Pellere project — staff, contractors, and any specialists brought in — is bound by written confidentiality obligations consistent with the standards above.
Subpoenas and legal process
If Pellere receives a subpoena or other legal process seeking client information, we will, to the extent permitted by law, promptly notify you so you can seek a protective order or otherwise respond before we are required to produce anything.
AI governance principles
Pellere works at the intersection of human judgment and intelligent systems. We use artificial intelligence inside our practice — for research, drafting, synthesis, pattern recognition, and operational automation — and we believe clients have a right to know exactly how. These principles govern that use.
AI accelerates and broadens our work, but it does not replace the human judgment our clients are paying for. Every recommendation, every diagnostic, every Momentum Intelligence Management™ output is reviewed and stood behind by a Pellere practitioner.
We do not submit client confidential information to public AI tools that may train on that data. When AI assistance is used in your engagement, we use enterprise-grade tooling configured with no-training data terms, or we work with information that has been generalized or anonymized in a way that cannot be linked to your organization.
If you want to know where AI was used in your engagement, we will tell you. If you would prefer no AI involvement in your engagement at all, we will accommodate that and quote the engagement accordingly.
We do not deploy AI agents to take consequential actions on a client's behalf without human authorization in the loop. Recommendations may be AI-assisted; decisions are not.
AI systems carry the biases of the data and processes used to build them. Where we use AI to evaluate people, opportunities, or markets, we apply the same scrutiny we would apply to any analyst's work — checking for unsupported confidence, demographic skew, and reasoning that does not survive the question "how do you know?"
Deliverables produced for clients identify when AI was substantively involved in their creation, in the same way a research paper acknowledges its methods. We do not claim authorship for work that AI produced and we did not meaningfully shape.
The tools and norms of professional AI use are changing quickly. We review our internal AI policies, vendor agreements, and operating practices at least annually, and immediately when material new risks or capabilities emerge.
Secure client communications
Most of the friction between consultants and clients is communication friction. We have built ours to be secure, fast, and respectful of how senior people actually work.
Our business email is hosted on Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online) with multi-factor authentication on every account and modern email-authentication standards (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) configured on our domain. Mail in transit between major providers is encrypted with TLS by default. For information that should not travel by email, we recommend the channels below.
Document exchange
For sensitive documents, we provide a per-engagement access-controlled workspace through Microsoft 365. Links are share-restricted (no anonymous links), expire by default, and can be revoked at any time. Where clients have a preferred secure file-transfer or data-room platform, we work in your environment instead of asking you to learn ours.
Video and voice
We use enterprise video conferencing with end-to-end encryption available on request for sensitive sessions. Recording is opt-in by you and never automatic. If recordings are kept, they are stored under the same retention rules as other engagement materials.
Channels we do not use for confidential work
We do not conduct confidential engagement work over SMS, personal messaging apps, or public social-media direct messages. If those are the most convenient way to schedule a call or share a meeting room number, that is fine; substantive engagement material does not move through them.
Identity and impersonation
If you receive a message that appears to be from Pellere but feels unusual — an urgent payment request, an unfamiliar attachment, a change of bank details, a sudden request for a credential — please verify it through a known phone number before acting. We will never ask for your passwords, multi-factor codes, or signed authorizations through unverified channels.
Enterprise data handling standards
When you engage Pellere, you give us access to information — financial models, employee data, customer lists, strategic plans, board materials — that is the lifeblood of your organization. These standards describe how we handle it.
Classification
We classify engagement data into four tiers, and apply progressively stronger controls at each tier:
- Public. Information already in the public domain. Standard handling.
- Internal. Non-public business information not particularly sensitive. Access-controlled.
- Confidential. Information whose disclosure could harm the client's competitive position, reputation, or relationships. Access limited to engaged team; encryption at rest and in transit; no copying to unmanaged devices.
- Restricted. Personal data of identified individuals, regulated data (financial, medical, legal-privileged), and trade secrets. Need-to-know access only; logged; subject to enhanced retention and disposal controls.
Encryption
All engagement data is encrypted in transit using current TLS standards. Data at rest in our managed workspaces is encrypted using the encryption defaults of our enterprise providers (Microsoft 365 and our hosted infrastructure), which use AES-256 or equivalent industry standards.
Access controls
Access to engagement materials is granted on a need-to-know basis to the specific personnel engaged on your work. Access is reviewed at engagement milestones and removed promptly when no longer required. Multi-factor authentication is required for access to any system containing engagement data.
Devices
Personnel access engagement data only from managed devices configured with full-disk encryption, screen-lock policies, current operating system updates, and remote-wipe capability. Personal devices may be used for non-substantive scheduling and coordination only.
Retention and deletion
- Active engagement materials are maintained for the duration of the engagement and a defined post-engagement period agreed in your engagement letter (typically 12–24 months) for reference, audit, and continuity.
- After that period, engagement materials are deleted, except where (a) you have asked us to keep them longer, (b) we are required to retain specific records by law, professional standards, or contractual obligation, or (c) the records are necessary to defend a legal claim.
- Deletion is performed using methods designed to render information unrecoverable.
- On engagement closeout, you may request return or transfer of your data; we will accommodate any reasonable request.
Subcontractors
Where Pellere engages subcontractors or specialists who will access engagement data, those parties are bound by written confidentiality and data-protection obligations consistent with our standards, and access is scoped to what they need.
Incident response
Pellere maintains an incident-response plan covering detection, containment, investigation, client notification, and remediation. [LEGAL REVIEW — breach-notification timing varies by jurisdiction and contract.] If we become aware of a security incident affecting your data, we will notify you without undue delay, share what we know, what we are doing, and the steps you should consider taking. Specific notification timelines are described in your engagement letter and reflect the requirements of applicable law.
Compliance
Pellere is a US-based professional services firm and is not currently certified to a specific information-security standard such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001. We benchmark our practices against those frameworks and against the data-handling expectations of regulated industries we serve. Where your engagement requires specific compliance attestations or contractual security terms, we will work with you to address them in your engagement letter or in a separate data-processing addendum.
Audit and questions
If you have questions about how a specific kind of information will be handled in your engagement — or if you have your own data-protection terms you would like us to sign — please raise them at the proposal stage. We would rather have the conversation early than learn about a constraint mid-engagement.