Charter Bank values each and every customer relationship.  We understand that you have entrusted us not only with your finances, but also with your personal information.  In continuing our commitment to provide quality service to our customers, Charter Bank has adopted the following Privacy Policies for officers, directors and employees.   

 

This is our pledge to you, our valued customers: 

 

1. We recognize your right to privacy. 

We recognize that you expect privacy and security of your personal and financial affairs.  We understand the need to safeguard our sensitive information about you that you have entrusted to us.  Therefore, we will not disclose any nonpublic personal information about you, our customer, to anyone, except as permitted by law. 

 

2. How we collect, retain and use information about you. 

Your relationship is important to us, and we're committed to providing you with the best service possible.  To do that, we use, collect and retain information about you only when we reasonably believe that the information will assist us in our business and in providing products, services and other opportunities to our customers.  We will use your information to administer your accounts and transactions and to provide you with products and services that enable you to manage your finances most effectively.  We collect nonpublic personal information on you from the following sources: 

-      Applications and other forms you fill out and provide to us; 

-      Your transactions with us; 

-      Reports from consumer reporting agencies such as credit bureaus. 

 

3. We will maintain accurate information about you. 

We have implemented procedures to help assure that our customers' financial information is accurate, current and complete in accordance with commercially reasonable standards.  While some procedures are required by federal and state law, we also have procedures for responding to requests to correct inaccurate information in a timely manner, and to update information as well as remove old information.  You should notify us immediately if you receive information regarding our banking relationship that you believe to be inaccurate. 

 

4. We will protect your information. 

One of the ways we protect your information is by limiting employee access to personally identifiable information to those staff members who have a business reason to know such information about you.  We educate our staff on the importance of confidentiality and customer privacy through standard operating procedures, training programs and our policies on ethics.  We will take appropriate disciplinary actions to enforce employee privacy responsibilities.   In addition, we maintain physical and electronic safeguards that comply with federal standards to guard your nonpublic personal information. 

 

5. We restrict the disclosure of your information to others. 

We will not reveal specific information about your accounts or other information that will personally identify you to unrelated third parties for the third parties to use for their own purposes.  We do share information with companies that work for us.  For example, we may share information with companies that print checks for us or provide data processing services.  These companies are acting on our behalf when they provide these services and are obligated by contract to maintain the information that they receive in a confidential manner.  They are never authorized to use the information for any other purpose. 

 

We also provide information  

-       When you request or authorize it;  

-       To complete a transaction initiated by you;  

-       To a reputable credit reporting agency; 

-       To account verifications services or check fraud services; or  

-       When otherwise lawfully permitted or required by regulation, court order or subpoena. 

 

6. We will respect and protect your on-line privacy. 

Visitors to Charter Bank's website, "charterbanker.com", remain anonymous.  We do not collect personal information identifying information about site users, unless you choose to provide such information.  If you choose to provide us with additional information about yourself by applying for a specific Charter Bank product or otherwise provide information to us, we will retain and use that information in accordance with our Privacy Policy.  Standard software is used to collect and store ONLY the following non-identifying information about our visitors: the name of the domain from which you accessed the Internet, (AOL, Yahoo, etc.); the date and time you accessed "charterbanker.com" and the Internet address of the Web site from which you linked directly to our site.     

 

If you use any of the various on-line banking components offered within "charterbanker.com", you would be asked to provide confidential, identifying information such as our account number or social security number.  This information is used internally, as appropriate, to handle the sender's request and manage "charterbanker.com" web site.  It is not disseminated or sold to other organizations.  We use strong encryption technology to protect the privacy of personal information supplied to us or accessed through "charterbanker.com" on-line banking. 

 

We preserve the content of your email, your email address and our response so that we can better serve you.  Depending on the content of your email, we may be required by existing laws and regulations to keep this information.  If you send email to us, please remember that email is not secure against interception and is not subject to the strong encryption technology offered in our on-line banking component.  If your email contains information that is very sensitive or includes personal identification or account numbers, you may wish to consider sending this information to us in another way. 

 

"charterbanker.com" is directed to a general audience.  We do not knowingly solicit or collect information personal information from children on our site.   

 

7. We will disclose our privacy commitment to you. 

We want you to understand our commitment to your personal privacy and our use of information.  For this reason, we have prepared these privacy principles.  If you have any questions about how Charter Bank protects your confidential information, please contact us at 5526 NW 86th Street, Johnston, Iowa 50131 or by calling (515) 331-2265. 

 

These customer privacy principles apply to all Charter Bank customers and we reserve the right to change them at any time.