CIBC Mellon Legal and Regulatory Matters

CIBC Mellon Privacy Statement

At CIBC Mellon your privacy is protected

At CIBC Mellon, an important part of our commitment to you is respect for your privacy.

Keeping your personal information in strict confidence is a cornerstone of our business and an integral part of our commitment to service excellence. To help us meet this commitment to you, CIBC Mellon appointed a Chief Privacy Officer to oversee CIBC Mellon’s privacy policies and procedures. Our privacy commitment is described in the following pages.

This Privacy Statement applies to the collection, use, sharing, protection, accuracy of and access to personal information at CIBC Mellon. “Personal Information” means information about an identifiable individual such as contact information, account numbers, or details such as age, marital status, and financial information. This information can be in any form including paper, electronic, video or voice recording. This Privacy Statement does not apply to information about our employees or to information that is not personal information.

Our policies and procedures are in place across CIBC Mellon. Applicable legislation provides for certain exceptions to the obligations discussed in this Privacy Statement, some of which will modify our privacy practices in certain circumstances.

Why we collect personal information

CIBC Mellon occasionally collects your personal information to provide services, or we may collect personal information on behalf of clients, client employees, and/or pensioners when we are providing Trustee or Agent Services. We collect personal information in a variety of ways including trade instructions, verbal interaction, online activities and other documentation that you provide to us. This includes information that your web browser, device or other web technologies, such as cookies and web beacons, may provide us. We may also receive personal information from firms that assist us in administering your account and processing transactions on your behalf. Some examples of types of personal information we may be required to collect include an individual’s name, address, telephone number, social insurance number, tax identification number, asset holdings, identification documents or other information necessary to perform the services on your behalf or as permitted or required by law.

CIBC Mellon will make all reasonable efforts to limit collection of personal information to information that is required for valid business purposes or to comply with legislation and a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances.

How we use personal information

In general, CIBC Mellon uses personal information to:

  • Provide services, administer accounts, carry out your directions, respond to your inquiries and perform necessary tax reporting functions
  • Contact you regarding your account and services and verify your identity when you contact us regarding your account or services
  • Meet legal or regulatory requirements and industry practices applicable to services provided
  • Measure website usage and improve functionality
  • Maintain business records for reasonable periods, or as required to meet legal or regulatory requirements, and to generally manage and administer our business.

Some examples of the specific ways we use your personal information include:

Trustee Services

CIBC Mellon uses personal information when an individual appoints us as his or her trustee for a retirement savings or other similar plan. This may occur when an individual purchases such a plan through a broker or financial intermediary who engages CIBC Mellon to act in the role of trustee and enter into declarations of trust with its customers to establish such plans.

Agent Services

CIBC Mellon uses personal information when a corporate, business or governmental client has hired us to handle information for them. A client might hire us as a plan or trust record keeper, plan administrator, or they might ask us to perform trust, asset servicing or mailing services. Such activities may include the processing of plan holder or unit holder transactions or payments, the administration of pension benefit payments and processes, and recordkeeping associated with these activities.

Voice Recordings

CIBC Mellon has telephone assistance lines which support various Trustee and Agent Services. When you call in to one of these lines, your call is recorded. This helps protect both you and us by providing a record of the conversation. It also helps us monitor the quality of service we offer.

CIBC Mellon Website

CIBC Mellon may use your IP address to diagnose problems with our servers, to understand the geographical location of our visitors and to enhance our websites (an IP address is a unique identifier for a device on the internet). In addition, personal information may be requested via the website if a visitor chooses to respond to online surveys, send CIBC Mellon an email message or use one of our website tools.

In some cases, we may collect information about you that is not linked with an identifiable individual. Examples of this type of information include the Internet browser you are using, the type of operating system, the domain name of the website that linked you to our site, and the pages you visited while you were using the website. When collected, we use non-personally identifiable information in a non-identifying, anonymous and aggregate form to determine the overall reaction to various sections of the website, measure the effectiveness and usefulness of various pages and to improve the flow and interconnectivity of the site.

When you view our websites we may also store information from time to time on your computer. This information is stored in the form of “cookies” or “web beacons”. A “cookie” is a small file placed on your device when you visit certain websites. “Cookies” allow us to tailor the website or advertisement to better match your interests and preferences. “Web beacons” are tiny graphic images placed on our website pages or in our emails. They may be used to measure response rates to our communications and to help us to improve our web pages and promotions. With most Internet browsers you can block, receive a warning or erase all “cookies” from your hard drive. Please refer to your browser instructions or help screen to learn more about these functions.

CIBC Mellon websites may contain links to non-CIBC Mellon websites. CIBC Mellon is not responsible for the information and privacy practices of these websites. We recommend that you read the privacy policy of each of these websites to learn about its information and privacy practices before you provide any personal information.

Who we share personal information with

CIBC Mellon will not share or disclose any personal information that we have collected to anyone except as permitted by this Privacy Statement or as required to comply with legal and regulatory requirements and in a manner consistent with industry practices. Some examples of specific ways we may share your personal information include:

  • Use of another company to process information.


    In providing any of the Trustee Services or Agent Services set out above, personal information may be shared with related, affiliated companies (including parent companies) or third parties who have been retained by CIBC Mellon to assist us in carrying out administrative or technological functions. For example, performing certain database management, maintenance or processing functions, operating recordkeeping systems or printing tax forms. This outside company might be in Canada or might be in a foreign jurisdiction, such as the United States. Personal Information may become subject to the laws of that jurisdiction, including those laws governing disclosure. When CIBC Mellon uses such a company, we select the company carefully and require that it uses standards comparable to ours, subject to requirements in foreign jurisdictions applicable to those organizations.
  • Must disclose information for legal reasons or regulated industry practices.


    We may be required to share information by law (including tax reporting, anti-money laundering, terrorist financing and securities legislation in Canada and other countries, including the United States), by court order, or to a regulatory authority or to a successor trustee or agent. We may also disclose certain personal information to corporate, business or government bodies to enable them to comply with similar legal and regulatory requirements applicable to them. Our policy is to release information only to the extent required to fulfill these requirements and meet industry practices.
  • When CIBC Mellon is processing information for another.


    When someone hires us to process information for them, we will share that information with them. Examples include pension plan sponsors and investment fund managers.
  • Enter into certain business transactions.


    Personal information may be used by CIBC Mellon and disclosed to parties connected with the contemplated or actual financing, securitization, insuring, reorganization, sale, assignment or other disposal of all or part of CIBC Mellon or our business or assets.

How you consent to the use of your personal information

By appointing CIBC Mellon to perform Trustee or Agent services, you consent to CIBC Mellon’s collection, use and sharing of your personal information as described in this Privacy Statement.

Consent can be express or implied. Express consent can be verbal or written. For example, an application for registration of a retirement savings plan may contain a written consent for our use of your information to carry out the role of a retirement savings plan trustee. Or you might consent to release the information over the phone. Consent is implied when we can reasonably conclude that you’ve given consent by an action you’ve taken or not taken, or where the context reasonably requires that we have and use information to carry out what you have asked us to do.

You can withdraw your consent any time after you’ve given it to us by contacting our Privacy Officer, provided there are no legal or contractual requirements to prevent this and on reasonable notice. If you do not consent to certain uses of information or if you withdraw your consent, we may not be able to provide a particular service. If so, we’ll explain the situation to you to help you with your decision.

CIBC Mellon may be required or permitted under statute or regulation to collect, use or disclose personal information without your consent, for example to comply with a court order, to comply with local, federal or foreign regulations or a legally permitted inquiry by a Canadian or foreign government agency, or to collect a debt owed to us. When someone hires CIBC Mellon to process your information for them, you may have provided them with express or implied consent to share that information with CIBC Mellon so that CIBC Mellon can carry out the information processing. This is in accordance with requirements they may have to obtain consent. Once it is shared with us, we will safeguard it and handle it in accordance with this Privacy Statement.

Protecting your personal information

CIBC Mellon takes the protection of your personal information seriously. We will keep your information in confidence and will make every reasonable effort to prevent unauthorized use, sharing, loss or theft of information. We regularly audit our security procedures and assess their effectiveness and appropriateness.

Our employees and agents who have access to your personal information are made aware of the importance of keeping it confidential. Each employee must certify annually that he or she has maintained the confidentiality of personal information entrusted to him or her. CIBC Mellon has procedures in place to assist our employees in complying with our policies and our internal auditors monitor the adherence to these policies and report any findings to a committee of the Board of Directors of CIBC Mellon.

CIBC Mellon uses multiple layers of protection when you access any of our online products or services, including web browser encryption, firewalls and monitoring.

We keep your information only so long as we need it for the services we’ve been hired to deliver, subject to reasonable business record retention policies and legal requirements. We have standards that meet these requirements and destroy information or render it anonymous when it is no longer needed.

Accessing Your Personal Information & Maintaining Accuracy

CIBC Mellon will maintain your control over and access to your information.

Upon written request, you can check your information to verify, update and correct it, and have obsolete information removed. There is no charge for verifying or correcting information. Depending on the circumstances, there may be a charge if you want a copy of records or if special expense is involved in retrieving your information. We will advise you of any charges in advance.

CIBC Mellon will promptly deal with your request to see your information within 30 days. If we need to extend the time, we’ll notify you of the reasons for the extension and your rights under applicable legislation. If we have to refuse the request, we’ll tell you why (subject to any legal restrictions).

Whenever possible and appropriate, we’ll correct any information we have shared with any other organization. If we’ve received the information from another party, if possible, we’ll let you know the name and address of the party so that you can ask them to correct it (subject to any legal restrictions).

There may be files that comingle information about you and other people which is confidential, the property of CIBC Mellon or other clients, is protected by solicitor-client privilege or otherwise not subject to access. Because we value everyone’s confidentiality and legal rights we cannot make these files available outside of CIBC Mellon or our related companies (including parent companies). However, where we can, through reasonable efforts, separate your information from the information of others without affecting another’s confidentiality or legal rights, we will make available to you your information contained in the files.

Addressing Any Privacy Concerns

If there are any questions or complaints about this Privacy Statement, or practices related to managing your personal information that have not been answered, please let us know right away. In most cases, a complaint, question or concern can be resolved simply by talking to us about it.

CIBC Mellon is committed to treating everyone with the greatest respect and consideration and to providing the highest level of service. Even so, from time to time there may be a misunderstanding, or someone may feel treated unjustly. Whatever the circumstances, resolving the problem is our primary concern. Any questions or concerns regarding your personal information or regarding our personal information policies or procedures, or requests to withdraw consent can be directed to our Privacy Officer by any of the following means.

By Mail:

CIBC Mellon Privacy Officer
1 York Street, Suite 500
Toronto, Ontario
M5J 0B6
Canada

By Phone: (416) 643-5000

By E-Mail: privacyofficer@cibcmellon.com

This Privacy Statement is effective as of January 31, 2018. We may change this Privacy Statement from time to time, and, if we do, the most current version can be obtained by contacting us as above, or by accessing our website www.cibcmellon.com. This policy applies to CIBC Mellon Trust Company and CIBC Mellon Global Securities Services Company.

Throughout this document, the words “we” and “us” refer to CIBC Mellon. The words “you” and “your” refer to CIBC Mellon clients, former clients, potential clients, clients’ employees, as well as visitors to the CIBC Mellon website or persons who otherwise provide personal information to CIBC Mellon.