Protecting Confidentiality

by Mary Beth Guard

Question: An officer at our bank received an "offering" over the internet from a division of a national bank. Their long term capital securities were being converted to the next Pooled Trust Preferred Offering to a floating rate issuance.

At the end of the offering description there was a disclosure stating:
"This information may contain confidential and/or privileged material and is only transmitted for the intended recipient. Any review, retransmission, conversion to hard copy, copying reproduction, circulation, publication, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action, or omission to take action, in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this message in error, please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer, disk drive, diskette, or other storage device or media. Although this information has been obtained from sources which we believe to be reliable, we do not guarantee its accuracy, and it may be incomplete or condensed. This is for information purposes only and is not intended a an offer or solicitation with respect tot he purchase or sale of any etc."

My question - Is this type of disclosure needed on certain types of e-mail sent? And, where can I find the requirement rules?

Answer: An "offering" of the type you describe is governed by securities laws and rules which may mandate the type of disclosure they included.

With respect to pure banking emails, however, there is no legal requirement that you include such a statement. HOWEVER, just as many entities already do on faxes, you may want to consider including this type of statement in emails in order to protect the confidentiality of the information transmitted, since one wrong keystroke can send an email to an unintended recipient. In the information security guidelines, one of the risks to customer information security you are required to guard against is the risk of unauthorized disclosure. This type of disclosure would be one safeguard that could be employed, or you could require emails containing sensitive or confidential information to be encrypted.

Originally appeared in the Oklahoma Bankers Association Compliance Informer.

First published on BankersOnline.com 10/ /01