Online privacy statement

How we collect and protect information online

We respect your privacy

In accordance with our Corporate Privacy Principles, we are committed to providing the highest quality financial products and services in a manner that fosters trust and confidence among our customers, employees and representatives. That commitment includes protecting the privacy of all the personal information in our care.

What information we collect

Most websites you visit use cookies to improve your user experience by enabling that website to ‘remember’ you, either for the duration of your visit (a ‘session cookie’) or for repeat visits (a ‘persistent cookie’).

When you visit our websites, we may collect information from you in order to gauge usage and to improve your experience on our sites. In order to do this, we may collect information such as your IP address, the type of operating system you use, the time and duration of your visit to our sites, your geographical location and the web pages you visit within our sites. We may collect information about the number of times you visit our site and whether you are a new or repeat visitor. We may track where on our website you explore, how long you stay on a site and at what point you exit from our website.

We will only collect information that is pertinent and consistent with the purposes of the collection.

Use of Cookies and Web Beacons

Some of the information we collect will be gathered, by us or by agents on our behalf, through the use of “cookies” and “web beacons”.

Cookies are small text files that are automatically placed on your web browser in your computer by a web server. Cookies contain information that can be retrieved by a web server in the domain that issued the cookie to you. Cookies can make a website more useful by storing information about your preferences on our websites, which allows us to provide more useful features for you.

We may use cookies to:

• Allow our web server to determine whether the cookies setting on your web browser has been enabled or disabled so that we will know whether data can be collected from your web browser;
• Track your visits to our websites and recognize your web browser when you are a repeat visitor so that we can gather statistics on the number of new and repeat visitors and evaluate our website effectiveness;
• Temporarily store information on your reading preferences and your path between pages on our website to give us insight on ways to further improve our website to provide a more useful, customized and enriching website experience;
• Temporarily identify your web browser after you have logged in on a secured page on our website so that our web browser can maintain a dialogue with your web browser in order for you to carry out certain activities;
• Deliver targeted advertising with relevant messages that are more informative to you as an online consumer.

Our web pages may also contain electronic images known as web beacons. Web beacons are also sometimes referred to as “clear GIF images”, “pixel tags” or “single-pixel GIFs”. Web beacons are usually invisible to a user and are used for many of the same purposes as cookies.

We may include web beacons on our sites to:

• Determine if messages are opened and acted upon;
• Gather statistical information about our website usage patterns;
• Deliver information to you about our products and services.

The data collected by cookies and web beacons generally does not contain information that will identify one particular individual.

We use web analytics services, including Adobe Analytics and Google analytics, to analyze the use of our websites. These tools use cookies to collect and generate information about your visits to our sites (including your Internet Protocol address) that is transmitted to their servers in an anonymous form for processing. We study patterns of website activity so we can improve the experience of visitors to our sites.

Links to other websites

Some of our websites may contain links to other websites that are not affiliated with us. We do not monitor nor maintain the privacy practices of these websites, and do not have authority over them. We do not assume any responsibility for their privacy policies and procedures.

You can control what you share

Most browsers are initially set to accept cookies. If you would prefer, you can set your browser to disable cookies or to inform you when they are set. You also have the ability to delete cookies that you have accepted. If you delete or disable cookies, you may not be able to take full advantage of our websites.

You can opt-out of analytics activity by setting your browser to notify you when a cookie is sent and block analytics cookies if desired. Please consult your browser's Help Menu for instructions. Visiting our website with analytics cookies disabled will have no significant impact on your browsing experience. Google currently offers a free Google Analytics opt-out tool. Click here for the tool.