PRIVACY POLICY DISCLOSURE
(Protection of the Privacy of
Personal Non-Public Information)
Effective August 23, 2007
Our Commitment to Privacy:
Respecting and protecting customer
privacy is vital to our business. By explaining our Privacy Policy
to you, we trust that you will better understand how we keep our
customer information private and secure while using it to serve you
better. Keeping customer information secure is a top priority, and
we are disclosing our policies to help you understand how we handle
the personal information about you that we collect and disclose.
This notice explains how you can limit our disclosing of personal
information about you. The provisions of this notice will apply to
former customers as well as current & new customers unless we state
otherwise.
The Privacy Policy explains the
Following:
-
Protecting the confidentiality of our customer information.
-
Who is covered by the Privacy Policy?
-
How we gather information.
-
The types of information we share, why, and with whom.
-
Our commitment to data security.
-
Our commitment to your children’s privacy.
-
Opting Out – instructions for us not to share or change certain
information about you or not to contact you.
Protecting the Confidentiality of
Customer Information:
We take our responsibility to protect
the privacy and confidentiality of customer information very
seriously. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural
safeguards that comply with federal standards to store and secure
information about you from unauthorized access, alteration, and
destruction. Our control policies, for example, authorize access to
customer information only by individuals who need access to do their
work.
From time to time, we enter into
agreements with other companies to provide services to us or make
products and services available to you. Under these agreements, the
companies may receive information about you but they must safeguard
this information, and they may not use it for any other purposes.
Who is Covered by the Privacy
Policy:
We provide our Privacy Policy to all
customers when they conduct business with our company. If we change
our privacy policies to permit us to share additional information we
have about you, as described below, or to permit disclosures to
additional types of parties, you will be notified in advance. This
Privacy Policy applies to consumers who are new, current or former
customers.
How We Gather Information:
As part of providing you with
financial products or services, we may obtain information about you
from the following sources:
·
Applications, forms,
and other information that you provide to us, whether in writing, in
person, by telephone, electronically, or by any other means. This
information may include your name, address, employment information,
income, and credit references;
·
Your transaction with
us, our affiliates, or others. This information may include your
account balances, payment history, and account usage;
·
Consumer reporting
agencies. This information may include account information and
information about your credit worthiness;
·
Public sources. This
information may include real estate records, employment records,
telephone numbers, etc.
Information We Share:
We may disclose information we have
about you as permitted by law. We are required to or we may provide
information about you to third-parties without your consent, as
permitted by law, such as:
·
To regulatory
authorities and law enforcement officials.
·
To protect against or
prevent actual or potential fraud, unauthorized transactions,
claims, or other liability.
·
To report account
activity to credit bureaus.
·
To consumer reporting
agencies.
·
To respond to a
subpoena or court order, judicial process or regulatory authorities.
·
In connection with a
proposed or actual sale, merger, or transfer of all or a portion of
a business or an operating unit, etc.
In addition, we may provide
information about you to our service providers to help us process
your applications or service your accounts. Our service providers
may include billing service providers, mail and telephone service
companies, lenders, investors, title and escrow companies, appraisal
companies, etc.
We may also provide information about
you to our service providers to help us perform marketing services.
This information provided to these service providers may include the
categories of information described above under "How We Gather
Information" limited to only that which we deem appropriate for
these service providers to carry out their functions.
We do not provide non-public
information about you to any company whose products and services are
being marketed unless you authorize us to do so. These companies are
not allowed to use this information for purposes beyond your
specific authorization.
Our Commitment to Data Security
To
prevent unauthorized access, maintain data accuracy, and ensure the
correct use of information, we have put in place appropriate
physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and
secure the information we collect online.
We take precautions to
protect your information. When you submit sensitive information via
the website, your information is protected both online and offline.
Whenever we collect sensitive information (such as account
information or credit card data) that information is encrypted and
transmitted to us in a secure way.
While we use encryption
to protect sensitive information transmitted online, we also protect
your information offline. Only employees who need the information to
perform a specific job (for example, billing or customer service)
are granted access to personally identifiable information. The
computers/servers in which we store personally identifiable
information are kept in a secure environment.
Our Commitment to Your Children’s
Privacy
Protecting the privacy of
the very young is especially important. For that reason, we never
collect or maintain information at our website from those we
actually know are under 18, and no part of our website is structured
to attract anyone under 18.
Opting Out & Correcting Your
Information:
We also may share information about
you within our corporate family of office(s). We may share all of
the categories of information we gather about you, including
identification information (such as your name and address), credit
reports (such as your credit history), application information (such
as your income or credit references), your account transactions and
experiences with us (such as your payment history), and information
from other third parties (such as your employment history).
By sharing this information we can
better understand your financial needs. We can then send you
notification of new products and special promotional offers that you
may not otherwise know about. For example, if you originally
obtained a mortgage loan with us, we would know that you are a
homeowner and may be interested in hearing how a home equity loan
may be a better option than an auto loan to finance the purchase of
a new car.
You may prohibit the sharing of
application and third-party credit-related information within our
company or any third-party company at any time. If you would like to
limit disclosures of personal information about you as described in
this notice, just check the appropriate box or boxes to indicate
your privacy choices.
£
Please do not share
personal information about me with non-affiliated third-parties.
£
Please do not share
personal information about me with any of your affiliates except as
necessary to effect, administer, process, service or enforce a
transaction requested or authorized by myself.
£
Please do not contact
me with offers of products or services by mail.
£
Please do not contact
me with offers of products or services by telephone.
Note for Joint Accounts: Your Opt Out choices
will also apply to other individuals who are joint account holders.
If these individuals have separate accounts, your Opt Out will not
apply to those separate accounts.
You can access all your
personally identifiable information that we collect online and maintain
by sending us a written request with two forms of identification and
filling out the form below. Please allow for 2 to 10 days to respond to
changes. We use this procedure to better safeguard your information.
You can correct factual errors in your personally identifiable
information by sending us a request that credibly shows error. To
protect your privacy and security, we will also take reasonable steps to
verify your identity before granting access or making corrections.
If you feel that we are
not abiding by this privacy policy, you should contact us
immediately.
