What You Need to Know ─ the Requirements at a Glance
Regulation is hardly new to this industry. However, regulatory compliance is one of today's biggest challenges. What's different today is the zero-tolerance way that regulations are being interpreted and enforced, with once considered clerical and minor errors now becoming incurable errors.
Are you aware of the following January 2014 requirements?
Privacy Policy
PRIVACY POLICY DISCLOSURE
(Protection of the Privacy of Personal Non-Public Information)
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 serving you better. Keeping customer information secure is a top priority, and we collect and disclose it. This notice explains how you can limit our disclosing of personal information. The provisions of this notice will apply to former customers as well as current 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. Opting Out- how to instruct us not to share certain information about you or 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 customers when they conduct business with our company. Suppose we change our privacy policies to permit us to share additional information about you, as described below, or to permit disclosures to additional parties. In that case, you will be notified in advance. This Privacy Policy applies to consumers who are current customers or former customers.
How We Gather Information:
As part of providing 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, account usage, Consumer reporting agencies. This information may include account information and information about your creditworthiness. This information may include real estate, employment, telephone numbers, etc.
Information We Share:
We may disclose the information we have about you as permitted by law. We must provide information about you to thirdparties 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 application 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. These companies are not allowed to use this information for purposes beyond your specific authorization.
Opting Out
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 notify you 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, 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 only as necessary to conduct those transactions necessary to clear the title of any encumbrance for the lender to use the note as collateral or to sell the note. ( ) 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 joint account holders, and your Opt-Out will not apply to those separate accounts if these individuals have separate accounts.