Whether you are a current customer or just visiting us online,
we are committed to safeguarding your personal information.
The privacy statement that follows provides general information
about how we use and protect information about our customers.
See our statement on ONLINE PRIVACY AND
SECURITY for specifics on how we use and protect information
about visitors to our web site or users of our Internet
banking system.
At Vantus Bank, protecting the privacy and confidentiality of your
personal information is important to us. We value your business
and the trust you put in our corporate family. To offer
you the most valuable and convenient financial products
and services, we collect, maintain, and use information
about you on a routine basis. We recognize that you have
a right to expect that your personal financial information
will remain private and secure. Thus, the safekeeping of
customer information is a priority for us.
To help you better understand how your personal information
is used and protected, we are providing you with the following
statement describing our policies and practices with respect
to the privacy of customer information.
As your trusted financial institution, we collect, retain,
and use nonpublic personal information about individual
customers, as allowed by law, to provide products and services
to our customers. We collect nonpublic personal information
from the following sources:
-
Information we receive from you on applications
or other forms and through other means (such as your name,
address, phone number, social security number, assets,
liabilities and income);
-
Information about your transactions with
us, our affiliates, or others (such as your account balance,
transaction activity, payment history, parties to transactions
and credit card usage); and
-
Information we receive from a consumer
reporting agency (such as your creditworthiness or credit
history).
We do not disclose any nonpublic personal information about
our customers to anyone, except as permitted by law. We
limit who receives customer information and what type of
information is shared. And we pledge to conduct the sharing
of your information in strict adherence to applicable law.
The three sections that follow describe our information
sharing practices.
Within our Corporate Family
Our corporate family is made up of a number of financial
service providers and non-financial companies ("affiliates").
The First Federal Bankshares, Inc. corporate family includes:
- Banks
- Escrow and Closing Companies
- Real Estate Development
Companies
These companies work together to provide the products and
services you want and need, and we may share all categories
of nonpublic personal information we collect (as described
above in the Information We Collect
section) with our affiliates to this end. Under the Fair
Credit Reporting Act, we may share information that helps us identify you and certain customer transaction
and experience information ("identify and experience information")
1) for purposes other than direct marketing, without restriction and 2) for direct marketing purposes unless you tell us otherwise. This information comes from our account
records and includes such things as your:
-
Name
-
Address
-
Account balances
- Social Security number
-
Account activity
-
Types of accounts
- Payment history
Unless you tell us otherwise, we also may share with companies
in the first 3 categories of affiliates other customer information
("non-identity and non-experience information") such as:
-
Information we receive from you on applications
or other forms and through other means (such as your income,
marital status, and age);
-
Information we obtain from a consumer
report (such as your credit score or credit history);
-
Information we obtain to verify representations
made by you (such as your open lines of credit); and
-
Information we obtain from a person regarding
their employment, credit, or other relationship with you
(such as your employment history).
By sharing information about you, your accounts and your
relationships among our family of companies, we can save
you time and money by making it easier for you to do business
with us. For example, if you have an account with one of
our companies and want to open an account with another of
our companies, we may share information so that you might
not need to furnish the same information twice. Also, by
understanding you and your relationship, we can better meet
your needs and determine your eligibility for other products
and services that could be of value to you, whether offered by us or other members of our corporate family.
With Companies that Work for or with
Us
We may share all categories of nonpublic personal information
we collect (as described in the Information
We Collect section above) with companies that work
for us to provide you products and services that you've
requested or already have with us. These companies may
include financial service providers such as insurance
companies
and payment processing companies, and non-financial companies
such as check printing and data processing companies.
We
may also share all categories of nonpublic personal information
we collect (as described in the Information We Collect
section)
with companies that work for or with us to provide marketing
and other services on our behalf or other financial
institutions
with whom we have joint marketing arrangements.
All of these companies work on our behalf or with our sponsorship.
They are contractually obligated to keep the information
that we provide to them confidential, to use the information
only to provide the service we’ve asked them to perform
for you and us, and to maintain physical, electronic, and
procedural safeguards to protect your information.
With Outside Parties in Other Situations
We may also disclose all categories of nonpublic personal
information we collect (as described in the Information
We Collect section above) to government agencies, consumer
reporting agencies, and other outside parties as permitted
or required by applicable laws and regulations. These disclosures
are made for specific, limited purposes, such as to protect
your information and accounts from fraud, to manage security and risk, in connection
with a legal process, to make certain information a matter
of public record, for the sale of your account to another
financial institution, and in connection with audits and
examinations. We may also share all categories of nonpublic personal information we collect with your consent.
Our policies and practices regarding the collection, use,
and disclosure of information about former and inactive
customers are the same as those for existing, active customers.
Our information about former customers, however, is used
less and less over time and is eventually removed from our
records.
We understand that the protection of your nonpublic personal
information is of the utmost importance and that guarding
your privacy is our obligation. We restrict employee access
to customer information to only those employees who have
a business reason to know such information in the course
of providing products or services to you. We also educate
our employees about the importance of confidentiality and
customer privacy, and we require their commitment to this
principle. In addition, we maintain physical, electronic
and procedural safeguards that comply with federal standards
to guard your nonpublic personal information. We protect
the physical security of workplaces and records, maintain
backup copies of customer data, use computer virus detection
and eradication software, and employ hardware, software
and other technical means to guard against unauthorized
entry into our computer systems.
We continually strive to maintain complete and accurate
information about you and your accounts. We have established
procedures to ensure that your financial information is
accurate, current and complete, in keeping with reasonable
commercial standards. Should you ever believe that our records
contain inaccurate or incomplete information about you,
please notify us. We will promptly investigate your concerns
and correct any inaccuracies.
Our commitment to privacy extends to all areas of operations,
including our Internet activities. Whether you are a visitor
to our web site, a user of our Internet banking system
(IBS), or an online applicant for an account, loan, or other service, we safeguard your personal information. The privacy
statement that follows provides specifics about our online
privacy and security practices.
Protecting Visitors to our Web Site
We do not collect personal identifying information about
those who are merely visiting our web site. Standard software
is used to collect and store non-identifying information
about our web site visitors, such as:
-
The name of the domain from which they
access the site;
-
The date and time the site was accessed;
and
-
The Internet address of the web site from
which they linked to our site.
We do not use "cookies" in our interaction with
the browsers of web site visitors. More information about
cookies is provided in the section on Protecting
Users of Online Banking Services that follows.
When
you apply online for accounts, loans, or other services, or enroll in
Internet banking, you provide personal information necessary
for us to process your application. To ensure that your
information remains confidential, the information is sent
to us in a secure session through the use of encryption.
In other words, it is scrambled when sent and is decoded
once it reaches us. The information you send us through
online applications and enrollment forms is treated the same as personal information gathered through other means.
Visitors to our web site may communicate with us by use
of e-mail. If order to efficiently respond to e-mail communications
and to meet legal and regulatory requirements, we may preserve
the text of any visitor’s e-mail, their e-mail address,
and our response. Information submitted to us by e-mail
is treated as confidential and used only where appropriate
for business purposes. However, please be advised that e-mail
sent to us is not secure from interception because it is
not encrypted. Therefore, you are encouraged not to send confidential
information such as social security or account numbers to
us via e-mail. Likewise, we will not include confidential
information in our e-mail response to you.
Protecting
Users of Online Banking Services
When you use our Internet banking system (IBS), we along
with the companies we work with to bring you this service,
have access to information about you and your accounts.
Information is retained on our system or the system of our
Internet banking partners as necessary to serve you. Our
Internet banking partners are required to protect the confidentiality
of your information and to use it only in connection with
provision of the service you’ve requested.
State-of-the-art technology is used by us and our Internet
banking partners to make online banking secure and to protect
your personal information. The IBS brings together a combination
of industry-approved security technologies to protect data
for the bank and for you, our customer. It features password-controlled
system entry, enhanced login security, a VeriSign-issued Digital ID for the bank's
server, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol for data encryption,
and a router loaded with a firewall to regulate the inflow
and outflow of server traffic.
To begin a session with the bank's server the user must
key in a Log-in ID and a password. The IBS uses a "3
strikes and you're out" lock-out mechanism to deter
users from repeated login attempts. After three unsuccessful
login attempts, the system locks the user out, requiring
either a designated wait period or a phone call to the bank
to verify the password before re-entry into the system.
You can also help maintain the security of your banking
information by not sharing your Log-in ID or password with
anyone, by protecting them from unauthorized access, by
changing your password regularly and by remembering to sign
off when your transactions are complete.
Upon successful login, the Digital ID from VeriSign authenticates
the identity of the user and their computer and establishes a secure session with
that visitor. As part of this process, "cookies"
are used by our IBS to identify the user each session. A
cookie is a piece of data placed on your hard drive by a
web site server. Cookies do not collect personally identifiable
information, and they do not harm your system. For more information about cookies, please click here.
Once the server session is established, the user and the
server are in a secured environment. To learn more about the security of Internet banking, please click here.
Users of our IBS may communicate with us by use of secure e-mail.
If order to efficiently respond to e-mail communications
and to meet legal and regulatory requirements, we or our
Internet banking partner may preserve the text of any visitor’s
e-mail, their e-mail address, and our response. Information
submitted by e-mail during an IBS session is treated as confidential and used
only where appropriate for business purposes. E-mail sent through the IBS is "secure".
Protecting
Children’s Privacy
From our web site or IBS, we do not knowingly solicit, collect,
or use personal information from children under age 13.
In addition, we do not knowingly conduct online marketing
to children. We recognize that protecting children’s
identities and privacy online is important and that the
responsibility to do so rests with both the online industry
and with parents. For more information about the Children’s
Online Privacy Protection Act, visit the Federal Trade Commission’s
web site at www.ftc.gov.
Protecting Yourself
To make it easier for you to access our web site and IBS
or in order to improve access to information that may be
useful to you, we may link to or from other web sites not
operated by us. We cannot control and are not responsible
for the content of or the information privacy and security
practices of nonaffiliated third party sites linked to or
from our web site. We encourage you to review the privacy
policies of the sites linked to or from our site, before
you accept cookies from them or provide them with any personal
information.
We are committed to protecting customer information and to using or sharing it in ways that will improve or expand upon the services we provide to you. We also want you to know that we will uphold your lawful rights regarding how your customer information may be shared.
As previously described, we may share information about you with our corporate family members, and they may offer their products and services to you using information that we have shared. This information makes it easier for you to do business wtih us and helps us meet your financial needs by offering the right products and services to you. If you prefer to limit the sharing of information with corporate family members and the pruposes for which shared information may be used, simply notify us of your preferences by using this form and following the instructions provided. If you choose to do so, please remember that you may not receive offers about products and services that may be of value to you.
Since some marketing programs may already be in progress, it may take four to six weeks for your preferences to be fully effective.
9-07
|
