I have two quick questions:

A bank has three accounts, Joe Smith, Jane Smith, and a joint account Joe and Jane Smith. Do we send one notice to each customer or do we send notices to all account holders? Basically, are we required to sort out all the customers to avoid duplicate mailing if possible or can we simply mass mail notices to all accounts?

Also, we are developing a standard contract with third party vendors stating that they do not share information with third parties. Can anyone provide me with a sample form that they are using? I did see one on the ABA privacy kit on their web page.

thank you in advance.

My view is that you would need to mail two notices to that household -- one to John and one to Jane because they each have an individual account.

While you have the freedom to give John or Jane either one a notice on behalf of the joint account, there is no authority for you to give John the notice for Jane's individual account or vice versa.

The privacy rule says:

You must provide any privacy notices and opt out notices, including short-form initial notices, that this part requires so that each consumer can reasonably be expected to receive actual notice in writing or, if the consumer agrees, electronically.

If you addressed the privacy notice just to Jane or just to John, I don't think the other one could reasonably be expected to receive actual notice in writing.

After going through all of the various ways to get our Privacy Disclosure out, and debating how to make sure all required persons received the notice, we opted for this method of creating the mailing list:

We created a report of all accounts that have a consumer "Class Code" and then a report listing all account holders of those account along with their address and social security number. We downloaded the report into a database software to elimate all duplicate social security numbers.

We will pull this report as of a certain date to create our mailing list and have the notices sent out as a separate mailing. (We found we could not rely on statement inserts since we have some customers who do not receive a monthly statement - i.e. installment loan customers get coupon books, some savings accounts have quarterly statements, C.D.'s don't have monthly statements, Safe Deposit boxes....)

The day before we pull the report, we will begin giving the disclosure to all new customers.

Yeah - and while we are at it - we've had to add the $$$ of mailing costs to our annual budget.

THe response called from our NE regional FDIC office.

As for the privacy question, the rule allows a financial institution to
provide only one initial, annual, and opt out notice per account. The
confusion may be coming from the fact that each of the accountholders musthave the right to opt out. The final rule requires a financial institution to state in the opt out notice provided to a joint accountholder whether the institution will consider an opt out by a joint accountholder as an opt out
by all of the associated accountholders or whether each accountholder is permitted to opt out separately. The bottom line is that each
accountholder must have the right to opt out, and we will assume that they have been
appropriately notified of this right so long as the institution provides at least "one notice to those consumers jointly." We envision that banks will mail a single notice, addressed to all accountholders, to the address they normally send bank statements and other important information.

Tanya Duncan
Director, Federal Regulatory and Legislative Policy
Massachusetts Bankers Association