Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) are pre-approved legal contract templates issued by the European Commission that allow organizations to transfer personal data from the EU or EEA to countries without an adequacy decision, while contractually preserving GDPR-level protections. SCCs are the most common legal basis US-based email and cloud providers rely on to handle EU customer data.
How SCCs work
When a data exporter in the EU sends personal data to an importer in a third country, both parties sign the SCCs, which bind the importer to GDPR-equivalent obligations on security, subject rights, and onward transfers. SCCs are a contractual safeguard, not a change of jurisdiction: the importer's own national laws still apply to the data.
The limits of SCCs
After the Schrems II ruling, SCCs alone are often not enough. If the importer's country grants its government broad data-access powers, such as the US under the CLOUD Act, controllers must add supplementary measures and assess the risk case by case. A cleaner alternative is to keep data in a country covered by an EU adequacy decision, so no SCCs are needed. Mailpro hosts customer data in Switzerland, which the EU recognizes as adequate. See our guide to the best GDPR-compliant email marketing software and the related term GDPR.
Mailpro and data privacy
Skip the SCC paperwork entirely
With Mailpro Swiss hosting, your EU data stays inside European-adequate jurisdiction, so you do not rely on Standard Contractual Clauses at all.