Synergy Credit Union - Privacy Code

Our Philosophy on Privacy

Credit unions in Canada have a long history of respecting the privacy of their customers. As a co-operative financial institution, we are committed to developing policies, procedures and service offerings that address privacy concerns.

We continue to protect your privacy and your right to control the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information. We have procedures in place that guide our employees and directors in maintaining confidentiality. What has been our ongoing business practice has become our documented commitment to you.

Your credit union Board of Directors has adopted a Collection and Access of Personal Information policy, established related Policies and Procedures and appointed a Privacy Officer. Our employees understand the importance of the policies and procedures and follow them carefully. To find out more, please read further about our Privacy Policy, or how to contact our Privacy Officer.

Your Personal Information

What is personal information?

Personal information is information about an identifiable individual. This includes, for example, an individual's race, ethnic origin, colour, age, marital status, religion, education, medical information, criminal record, employment history, financial records, address, telephone number, email address, and Social Insurance Number.

Why do we collect it?

We hold personal information about members to help us meet and maintain the highest standards of financial service. This information can include your name, address, age, income, use of accounts and credit history.

We obtain this information from you directly, and from the product and service arrangements you have made with or through us. Information is also obtained with your permission from credit bureaus, other financial institutions and from the references you provide us.

Your personal information is collected for one or more of the following purposes:

- To understand your needs and eligibility for products and services.
- To open, maintain and administer your accounts and provide financial services that meet your needs.
- To obtain credit reports and evaluate your credit rating and credit worthiness.
- To administer and manage security and risk in relation to your accounts and the financial services provided to you.
- To comply with legal and regulatory requirements.
- To assist in dispute resolution.
- To offer and provide you with other products and services of the Credit Union and of its affiliates and service suppliers.

The law requires us to ask for your Social Insurance Number (SIN) when you open an interest-bearing account. We also ask for your SIN to identify you with credit bureaus and other financial institutions for credit matching purposes. Using the SIN is the best way to ensure the credit information actually refers to you. Giving us your SIN is not a condition of service.

Who do we share your personal information with?

We use trusted and reputable suppliers to provide cheque and statement printing, data processing, research and payment clearing services. We provide them with only information that is necessary to perform the required services. They are not allowed to use this information for any other purpose than what we contract them for. Our suppliers and their employees are required to protect your information in a manner that is consistent with our Privacy Policy.

Your information is sometimes shared within the Concentra Bank group of companies so we can offer you a full range of financial products and services. These affiliates include Credit Union Members Insurance Society (CUMIS), Aviso Financial Inc., Co-operative Trust Company of Canada, The Co-operators Insurance, Credit Union Payment Services (CUPS), Collabria Financial and Celero Solutions. Any product or service offering that is derived from this sharing of information comes directly from us and not from our affiliates.

How can you access and verify your personal information?

You have the right to review your personal information held by Synergy Credit Union and to verify its accuracy. To gain access to this information, contact us toll-free at 1-866-825-3301. You can expect that it will take 30 days for us to gather the information. You will be charged a fee of $25/hour to cover the expense of providing you with the information.

Should you discover upon review of your personal information that changes are required, please inform us.

The 10 Principles

The following is a summary of the 10 Principles of the Privacy and Confidentiality of Member Information Policy.

Accountability: We have designated a Privacy Officer who is accountable for our compliance with the principles of the Policy.
Identifying Purposes: When we ask you for personal information, we will identify the purposes for which it will be used or disclosed.
Consent: We require your knowledge and express or implied consent for the collection, use or disclosure of personal information.
Limiting Collection: The collection of personal information is limited to the purposes we have identified for you.
Limiting Use, Disclosure, and Retention: We will use or disclose your personal information only with your express or implied consent, or as required by law. We will retain your information for only as long as is necessary to fulfill identified purposes.
Accuracy: We will keep your information accurate, complete and up-to-date as is necessary for the purposes for which it is to be used.
Safeguards: We will protect your personal information with appropriate security safeguards.
Openness: We will make specific, understandable information readily available to you about our personal information policies and practices.
Individual Access: When you request it, we will give you access to your personal information, how we use it and to whom we disclose it. You are entitled to question its accuracy, its completeness and its uses.
Challenging Compliance: You are entitled to question the Privacy Officer about our compliance with any of these principles.

Your Consent

Depending upon the sensitivity of the information, you can provide us with your consent in writing, electronically or verbally.

We will obtain your consent in writing when you become a credit union member or when you apply for a new credit union service offering.

We may possess personal information about you that we collected prior to implementation of our Privacy Policy, for which we do not have your express consent to use. We will continue to use that information for the purposes listed, unless you ask us to stop using that information. This is considered implied consent.

We obtain or use your information only with your consent. We do not sell it to third parties or use it in any way we have not told you about. We obtain your consent before we:

- Obtain credit reports or check references.
- Contact you about other products or services of the credit union by direct mail, email or telephone.
- Share your information with our affiliates so that we can offer their products and services to you.
- Disclose your information to third parties unless we are obliged to do so by law or it is required for us to provide our financial services to you.
- Conduct research and surveys to assess your satisfaction with the Credit Union, its products and services.

A withdrawal of consent form provides you with an opportunity to limit the uses and disclosures of your personal information should you choose to do so. You may limit or withdraw your consent at any time, subject to legal or contractual obligations. For example, your credit union is required by law to provide a record of your interest earning information to the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency.

For more information, see our Privacy brochure. To withdraw your consent, please contact us.

Website privacy policy

On our website, we collect only personal information that is required to improve the services we offer, to improve our site content and, with your permission, to contact you with information about our services. We will not share any personal information obtained on this website with any other organization without your express knowledge and consent.

You can visit all public areas of our site without providing any personal information. Our site collects only non-personal information based on a visitor's Internet Protocol (IP) address (this is not personally identifiable). Information collected includes the date and time of visit, the type of Internet browser used to access the site, and the referring address (the link a visitor uses to access the site). This data is used to create statistics on site usage and improve online services.

If you send us an email, any information provided by you will be used only for the purposes of responding to your inquiry or acting on your request. We will not use your name or email address for any other purposes without additional consent.

Links to other websites

Our website contains links to other websites that are part of, affiliated with, or have a business relationship with Synergy Credit Union. When you leave our site to visit one of these other sites, the only information transferred to the new site is the fact that you came from the Synergy Credit Union website (the referring address). Transmission of this referring address allows other sites to monitor their own web traffic, but does not disclose any personal information about you.

Website usage statistics

To continually improve our site, we often collect statistics about how our members are using it. These are viewed in the aggregate and are not associated with you as an individual. We use this information for purposes such as improving the user experience.

The information collected may include:

Your IP address,
Your browser type and your operating system,
Data such as the number and types of pages visited, and the length of time spent per page and on the site overall,
Information that identifies you, such as your age and gender, to safeguard, detect and prevent fraud,
Information to determine the suitability and eligibility of financial products and services.

Our use of cookies

We also use a web technology called cookies. A cookie is a small information token that is stored on your computer. As you use this site, cookies are passed back and forth between our server and your browser.
Specifically, we use two kinds of cookies: session cookies and persistent cookies. A session cookie exists only for the length of your browsing session and is deleted when you close your browser. A persistent cookie is one that stays on your computer after you close your browser. A persistent cookie may or may not expire on a given date.

We use a session cookie to maintain the integrity of your online banking session. With each page that you visit, the cookie is passed back and forth between our server and your browser. We use the cookie to distinguish your session from the many others that may be happening at the same time. Our session cookies never store any personal information such as your name, or date of birth, or financial information, such as your accounts and balances.

We may use persistent cookies to (i) provide you with a customized experience by recording your preferences; (ii) gather statistical information such as average time spent on a page; and (iii) to show you targeted marketing information about Synergy Credit Union when you visit other websites. The data gathered provides us with information on how we can improve the design, content and navigation of our website.

Most recent browser versions allow you to set some level of control over which cookies are accepted and how your browser uses them. For example, it may be set to notify you when it is receiving a cookie so that you accept cookies from only known, reliable sites like this one. If you are concerned about cookies, we encourage you to upgrade your browser to a recent version and review its Help section to learn more about its specific control features.

Use of reCAPTCHA

In some areas we use reCAPTCHA to help us protect you and our site, by verifying that you are not a robot. In order to do this, reCAPTCHA collects browser and user information, including cookies that have been placed by Google over the last six months, how many mouse clicks you've made on the screen, the date, the language your browser is set to and any plug-ins you've installed on your browser. This information is then sent to Google, so that it can determine if the user is a robot. Use of reCAPTCHA is subject to the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

As we continue to expand our online banking service to serve you better and as new Internet technologies become available, we may update the information on this page at any time, to reflect changes.

Social media privacy policy

What do we post?

The content we share across our social media channels aims to keep you informed about the latest happenings around Synergy and your local communities. We attempt to create content with a purpose every time we post.

Some of the content you may see includes:

Products, services, promotions or contests.
Synergy and community events
Blog articles
Financial literacy tips and help
Media releases and news
Content that showcases our positive community impact

In addition to the content above, you will also see that we share and retweet news and links from our community that are aligned to our values, and we believe will be relevant and helpful to our followers.

Following/followers

Some social media accounts allow us to not just be followed, but to follow accounts that are relevant to us. This could include individuals, local businesses, community organizations, co-operatives or thought leaders relevant to the impact work we do as an organization. Our choice to follow these accounts does not imply an endorsement or association of any kind. Should a Synergy social media page follow you and you do not wish to be followed by Synergy, please follow these guidelines from Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.

Social media advertising

We strive to deliver you content, products and services that are interesting and useful to you. One way we do this is through interest-based, behavioral advertising with our third-party social media providers like Facebook or Twitter. Synergy uses third-party advertising tracking on synergycu.ca to gather information about your online activities, like the pages you visit the most. This information may then be used to deliver advertising that’s customized to your interests on our third-party social media pages. We will never track or monitor your private activity within Online Banking or any other secure areas of our website. For full details on how we protect your privacy please read our Privacy Code.

Some of our third-party advertisers include:

Google
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube

To have better control of what ads you see from us on these third-party platforms, you can take full control of your settings: Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube.

Online member support

Our members are frequently looking for new, convenient ways to receive service and support for their banking needs. We encourage you to contact our Member Contact Centre at 1-866-825-3301, through Live Chat or via email at webmail@synergycu.ca.

We can also use social media to have your questions answered in a timely manner. At Synergy, providing exceptional support to our members is core to what we do. Our social media support team is on hand Monday to Friday, 8:30am MST – 4:30pm MST.

Synergy will never ask for your account information, social insurance number or PAC, PAN numbers over social media. We may ask you to contact our Member Contact Centre or ask a representative to contact you if we cannot assist via social media.

When leaving Synergy Credit Union’s website

All Synergy social media pages are owned by third parties unaffiliated with us. We are not responsible for these third-party privacy or security policies. For full details on the policies of these third-party social media sites, please visit them directly: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube.

Team Synergy on social media

Our social media channels center on our community: from our employees to our members, local businesses and community organizations, our approach to social media is that our employees should represent us online as well. We give them some guidelines and then ask them to bring their unique perspective to our larger conversation. Synergy upholds everyone’s right to privacy online, and we ask our employees to do the same. We will never discuss a member’s personal transactions or account information online through personal staff accounts and instead direct our members to contact their branch or our Member Service Centre at 1-866-825-3301, so that their confidential information can be kept confidential.

Sponsored content

At Synergy we’re fortunate to have many passionate staff and members who are engaged on social media and who will often share Synergy related content on their personal social media channels. These individuals are not compensated for these social media posts and are sharing content by their own will.

Protect yourself online

Protecting your privacy is our top priority. Please consider these techniques for remaining secure while using social media.

Never publicly post your personal details such as your phone number, date of birth, address or employment details or common security questions (like your mother’s maiden name).
Be judicious about whom you allow to be your “friend” online, or to join your network.
Protect your mobile device. Do not leave your device unattended at any time and ensure you have privacy while using the Synergy mobile app. Ensure your phone’s password protection is up to date and be familiar with your account agreement obligations. More information about limiting your liability and our security guarantee can be found here.
Review all third-party social media pages’ privacy policies, guidelines and security settings prior to use.

Synergy’s social media house rules

Our social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube) are meant to be treated as community space for all our members. We want to ensure our social channels are an inclusive and respectful place for everyone. Are you about to post? Make sure to keep these things in mind:

Be respectful – We encourage everyone to have a voice, and welcome diversity and different points of view. Please be respectful of others and the differences that come from a diverse community.
Keep things clean – Using profanities doesn’t make for an inclusive space.
Privacy matters – Do not share personal information, you own or other members over any social media platform.
Be relevant – Avoid sharing links and comments that are unrelated to our membership and their interests and values.

Posts that don’t align with our community guidelines will be removed from our pages. Users who consistently violate our community guidelines will be blocked from engaging further with Synergy’s social media channels.

Questions/comments

If you have any questions or comments on Synergy’s social media activities, please email webmail@synergycu.ca.

If you have any concerns about how your personal information is handled or distributed, please contact us. Our Privacy Officer will be pleased to discuss your concerns with you.

Synergy Credit Union
101 - 4908 42 Street
Lloydminster, SK S9V 0E5
Attention: Privacy Officer
Email: privacy.officer@synergycu.ca

If, for any reason, you feel your concerns were not appropriately addressed, you may then take the matter to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Ottawa.

Synergy Credit Union reserves the right to amend its Internet Privacy Statement and its Privacy Policy at any time with or without notice. Please check this page periodically for changes.

Privacy Code