How We Protect Your Data—and How You Can Help

Key Takeaways

Today’s cybercriminals are more sophisticated than ever, and many of their tactics rely on one thing: exploiting trust. Whether it’s through phishing scams, identity theft or social engineering, cybercriminals are constantly looking for ways to trick people into giving up sensitive information.

That’s why protecting your data isn’t just about technology. It’s about staying vigilant, together.

Let’s explore some of the controls in place to safeguard your personal information and your investments. Then we’ll look at what you can do to help us protect your data and your dollars.

Ways We Protect Your Data

Encrypting your personal and financial data.

• Your data is encrypted both when it's stored and when it's sent—using industry-standard protocols like Transport Layer Security (TLS), which provides communications security over the network, and AES-256, a 256-bit encryption algorithm.

Controlling access to data.

• Access to your data is carefully restricted and continuously monitored. We enforce multifactor authentication across our key systems to ensure that even if login credentials are compromised, your information remains protected.

Investing in modern identity and access management practices.

• As part of our ongoing security maturity, we invest in modern identity and access management (IAM) practices, including stronger authentication methods, secure session management and more granular access controls. These efforts help us protect your information from both external threats and internal misuse.

Strengthening security in everything we build.

• Security is not a one-time step. It’s a core part of how we design, build and improve our systems.

Enhancing secure development practices.

• As we evolve our products and services, we’re continuously enhancing our secure development practices, integrating security earlier in the software life cycle and expanding automated testing to catch potential vulnerabilities before they reach production.

Defending against evolving threats.

• We’re investing in developer training, threat modeling, code scanning and regular security testing to ensure that as our technology grows so does its ability to defend against evolving threats.

How You Can Help Protect Your Information

Security is a shared responsibility—and you’re a key part of it. Here are a few simple steps you can take to help safeguard your information:

• Keep your contact information up to date so we can reach you quickly if we see suspicious activity on your account.

• Use strong, unique passwords for each account by using a password manager.

• Enable multifactor authentication to add an extra layer of protection.

• Stay alert for suspicious messages. If it seems off, it probably is.

• Don’t click on unfamiliar links or give out personal information by phone, text or email.

• Keep your devices and apps up to date to fix known security issues.

• Check your accounts regularly and report any unusual activity immediately.

• Know which third parties have access to your account information. Sharing your information with third-party money management apps and websites may carry risks.

• Keep mail secure to receive and store as many of your account statements electronically as possible. Consider going paperless and accessing your statements through our website.

• Monitor your credit. You can check your reports every year for free at AnnualCreditReport.com .

  Review your reports and note any accounts or transactions you don’t recognize. This will help you report the theft to the Federal Trade Commission and the police. For more help, see https://www.identitytheft.gov/Steps .

• Beware of check fraud. Paper checks contain personal information that can be seen by whomever gets their hands on them. Check fraud occurs when a criminal obtains money illegally using stolen checks or check information. Scammers often target the mail to steal checks and other personal or financial information with the intent to commit fraud and identity theft. They may even alter a check payee and dollar amount.

Staying Safe, Together

When you choose us to handle your financial and personal information, you’re putting your confidence in our ability to protect what matters most. We take that responsibility seriously.

Cyber threats are evolving, but so are we. We're constantly improving our security to stay ahead of emerging risks. And we’re here to help you do the same.

If you ever see something suspicious, or if you have questions about your security, please call 800-345-2021. We’re here to help.

Trust is built over time—and we’re committed to earning yours every day.