Privacy Policy

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.

Consumer Privacy: Our Promise to Customers

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.

Information We Collect

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).
Information We Share

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
    • Vantus Bank
  • Escrow and Closing Companies
    • United Escrow, Inc.
  • Real Estate Development Companies
    • Equity Services, Inc.
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.

Information of Former or Inactive Customers

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.

Protecting Your Information

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.
 
Ensuring Information Accuracy

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.

Online Privacy and Security

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 http://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.

Honoring Your Preferences

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.

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