Our Privacy Pledge

Citizens Bank is committed to the protection and confidentiality of our customers’ personal and financial information. In order to provide you with quality customer service and the products and services that best meet your needs, collection and retention of this information is necessary and is often times required by law. Therefore, the following notice is being provided to you, to help you understand your rights concerning the information we collect, how we use that information and the steps we take to protect your confidential information and privacy.

Applicability and Terms

To help you better understand, we will first define some terms and how our privacy policy applies to you. “We”, “our”, and “us”, when used in this notice, means Citizens Bank. The words “you” and “your” mean the following types of customers:

• Our consumer customers or their legal representative, who have a continuing relationship by purchasing or holding the following financial products or services that are used primarily for personal, family or household purposes:
  • Deposit account
  • Loan account
  • Credit card
  • Safe deposit box
  • Retail installment contract we hold and service
  • Self-directed Individual Retirement Account where we act as custodian or trustee

Nonpublic personal information means information about you that we collect in connection with providing a financial product or service to you. Nonpublic personal information does not include information that is available from public sources, such as telephone directories or government records. Hereafter, we will use the term “information” to mean nonpublic personal information as defined in this section.
 

An affiliate is a company we own or control, a company that owns or controls us, or a company that is owned or controlled by the same company that owns or controls us. Ownership does not mean complete ownership, but means owning enough to have control.

A nonaffiliated third party is a person we do not employ or a company that is not an affiliate of ours. Hereafter, we will use the term “other party”.

The Information That We Collect

In order to provide you with quality customer service and products that meet your needs, we collect nonpublic personal information about you from the following sources:

• Information you personally give to us on an application, on other forms and correspondence, and, in order to comply with certain laws and regulations. This may include, name, address, date of birth, phone number, e-mail address, assets, liabilities and net income.
• Information about your transactions with our affiliates, others, or us, such as your account number, account balance, location of transactions and payment histories.
• Information from a consumer reporting agency, such as credit and account history with others and credit worthiness.

Disclosure of your information

We will not share the information that we collect, as described above, except as permitted by law and as described below in this policy. As permitted by law, we may share this information in order to provide you with quality customer service and products that you have requested or otherwise authorized, and to protect against fraud and/or unauthorized transactions. Disclosure will be limited to the following types of companies:

• Other financial institutions with which we have a joint marketing agreement, such as insurance companies;
• Other parties with which we have contracted to perform specific services such as service providers, data processors and auditors;
• Other parties as permitted by law, such as, attorneys, title companies, appraisers and surveyors.

All of the information that we collect (as described above in this policy) may be disclosed to the above companies.

You may not opt out of this disclosure. However, these companies act on our behalf and they are contractually obligated to keep the information we disclose to them confidential and to use the information only for the purposes intended.

We do not sell customer information for any purpose.

Information About Former Customers

Our policy regarding the use of information previously collected from former customers is the same as that of our current customers.

The Confidentiality, Security And Integrity Of Your Information

We restrict access to information about you to those employees who need to know that information to provide products or services to you and to perform their job responsibilities. We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect this information. In addition, we educate our employees concerning the importance of confidentiality and customer privacy through standard operating procedures and our Employee Code of Conduct

Disclosure Applicable to our Website

Visitors to our web site remain anonymous. Unique personally identifiable information is not collected unless you knowingly and voluntarily provide such information. We do collect general information about your visit; such as when our site was accessed, which pages were accessed and what Internet provider was used. Unique personally identifiable information cannot be obtained from this information.

Cookies
“Cookies” are used to help us recognize and better serve you on subsequent visits to our site. A “cookie” is data that is sent by a web server to your browser when you have used a web site. The browser returns the “cookie” on subsequent transmissions, allowing the server to identify the user and specifically designated information.
 

You may control the use of “cookies” through your browser settings however, by doing so you may limit the functionality we provide when you visit our site.
 

E-Mail
We do not collect email addresses of visitors to our website unless you knowingly and voluntarily provide it to us for a specific purpose. When you send us an email, we will only use your email address to reply to you when necessary. We may retain your address to comply with legal and regulatory requirements and record retention and for quality assurance. However, we will not disclose your email address to other parties and retention will not be for the purpose of marketing any Citizens Bank products or services unless we have obtained your prior consent. You may reply to any email message we send to you to tell us that you longer wish to receive future messages from us.

Information About Your Children’s Privacy
We understand that the privacy and protection of your children is important. Therefore, our web site is not structured to attract or knowingly collect information from children under the age of 13.

Regulatory Oversight

This institution is chartered, licensed, or registered under the laws of the State of Texas and by state law is subject to regulatory oversight by the Texas Department of Banking. Any consumer wishing to file a complaint against this institution should contact the Texas Department of Banking through one of the means indicated below:

• In person or U.S. Mail:
  2601 North Lamar Boulevard, Suite 300,
  Austin, Texas 78705-4294;
• Telephone No.: 877/276-555;
• Fax No.: 512/475-1313;
• E-mail: consumer.complaints@banking.state.tx.us;
• Website: www.banking.state.tx.us