Privacy Notice and Security

At Forward Bank, we believe that the confidentiality and protection of our customers’ information is one of our fundamental responsibilities.

REV. 10/2023

What Does Forward Bank Do With Your Personal Information?

Why Do We Collect?

Financial companies choose how they share your personal information. Federal law gives consumers the right to limit some but not all sharing. Federal law also requires us to tell you how we collect, share, and protect your personal information. Please read this notice carefully to understand what we do.

What Do We Collect?

The types of personal information we collect and share depend on the product or service you have with us. This information can include:
Social Security number and income
account balances and payment history
credit history and credit scores

How Do We Collect?

All financial companies need to share customers’ personal information to run their everyday business. In the section below, we list the reasons financial companies can share their customers’ personal information; the reasons Forward Bank chooses to share; and whether you can limit this sharing.

Privacy Policy

Privacy policy related to sharing your personal information.
Reasons We Can Share Your Personal InformationDoes Forward Bank Share?Can You Limit Sharing?
For our everyday business purposes – such as to process your transactions, maintain your account(s), respond to court orders and legal investigations, or report to credit bureausYesNo
For our marketing purposes – to offer our products and services to youYesNo
For joint marketing with other financial companiesYesYes
For our affiliates’ everyday business purposes – information about your transactions and experiencesYesNo
For our affiliates’ everyday business purposes – information about your creditworthinessYesYes
For our affiliates to market to youYesYes
For our nonaffiliates to market to youNoWe don’t share

We don’t share

Who We Are

Who is providing this notice? Forward Bank

What We Do

How does Forward Bank protect my personal information? To protect my personal information from unauthorized access and use, we use security measures to comply with federal law. These measures include computer safeguards and secured files and buildings.

How does Forward Bank collect my personal information? We collect your personal information, for example, when you:

  • Open an account or deposit money
  • Pay your bills or apply for a loan
  • Use your credit or debit card

We also collect your personal information from others, such as credit bureaus, affiliates, or other companies.

Why can’t I limit all sharing? Federal law gives you the right to limit only:

  • Sharing for affiliates’ everyday business purposes – information about your creditworthiness
  • Affiliates from using your information to market to you
  • Sharing for nonaffiliates to market to you

State laws and individual companies may give you additional rights to limit sharing. See below for more on your rights under state law.

What happens when I limit sharing for an account I hold jointly with someone else? Your choices will apply to everyone on your account – unless you tell us otherwise.

Definitions

“Affiliates” Companies related by common ownership or control. They can be financial and nonfinancial companies.

  • Our affiliates include others, such as Forward Investment Services and Forward Insurance.

“Nonaffiliates” Companies not related by common ownership or control. They can be financial and nonfinancial companies.

  • Forward Bank does not share with nonaffiliates so they can market to you.

“Joint Marketing” A formal agreement between nonaffiliated financial companies that together market financial products or services to you.

  • Our joint marketing partners include Financial companies such as Elan credit cards.

To Limit Our Sharing

  • Call 715-387-1122 – our menu will prompt you through your choice(s)
  • Opt out by mail, simply send notice to Forward bank, 1001 N Central Ave, Marshfield WI 54449
  • Fill out online opt-out form

Please note: If you are a new customer, we can begin sharing your information 30 days from the date we sent this notice. When you are no longer our customer, we continue to share your information as described in this notice.

However, you can contact us at any time to limit our sharing.

Other Important Information

Mobile Banking Application Users: If you use our mobile banking application on your mobile device, we may collect and process information about your actual location. We use this data to provide relevant messaging, even when the app is not open on your screen, to tailor our products and services for you, and to occasionally offer you promotions of interest. You can enable or disable access to this location information, at any time, through your device settings and permissions associated with our mobile banking app.

Online Privacy Statement

We recognize the importance of protecting the privacy of personally-identifying information that may be submitted to us when you visit our website. The information we receive depends on what you do when you visit our site. This is how we handle the information we learn about you from your visit to our website.

If you visit our site to read or download information on our web pages such as press releases and checking and savings account information: We collect and store only the following information about you:

  • name of the domain from which you access the Internet (for example, aol.com, if you are connecting from an America Online account, or a similar domain corresponding to your Internet Service Provider “ISP”)
  • date and time you access our website
  • pages you may have visited on our site
  • and Internet address of the website from where you came to visit our website.

We use the information we collect to measure the number of visitors to the different pages and sections of our site, and to help us make our site more useful to visitors.

If you visit our website to use interactive banking tools such as financial calculators and self-tests: You may be asked for personal information in order to complete the requested analysis or evaluation. This information is not retained. If you identify yourself by sending an e-mail or filling forms such as applications, check reorder forms, contact forms and guest registers:

You may be asked for personally-identifying information in order to process your e-mail, form or application. This information may be retained by us and our business partners for processing and to facilitate decisions. Information you submit to us is treated no differently than any information you might provide in a written format such as a brochure application, reorder slip to order checks, or a letter.

We want to be very clear. We protect and safeguard the privacy of users of our on-line services, just as we do throughout the rest of our business. We will use personal information to identify you, to communicate with you, and to help us answer your questions.

We will not sell personally-identifying information to a third party for the purpose of solicitation or provide personal information to a third party for its own use.

Sometimes we send our customers information about our products and services. If you do not wish to receive this information, or if you believe that your personal information is incorrect please contact us. We will investigate the situation and if appropriate update our records.

If you have any questions that are not answered in this section, please contact us.

Account Removal Request

To request your online access and associated data be deleted:

Requesting Forward Bank to delete online access and the associated data will remove your account access for all Digital products including the access from apps for the Web, Android, and iPhone. Your online data is archived to facilitate account recovery. The archived data includes information that links you to your bank account and personalized settings. Archived user data cannot be used to access financial accounts or other protected information. The archived data is retained indefinitely.

Requesting Forward Bank to delete online access and associated data will not remove or close your bank accounts, only your access to Digital products.

Security Statement

Our website brings together a combination of industry-approved security technologies to protect data for the bank and for you, our customer. It features a VeriSign-issued Digital ID for the bank’s Internet Service Provider hosting our website, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol for data encryption, and a router and firewall to regulate the inflow and outflow of server traffic.

Secure Data Transfer: Once a server session is established on a https secure page, the user and the server are in a secured environment. Because the server has been certified as a 128-bit secure server by VeriSign, data traveling between the user and the server is encrypted with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol. With SSL, data that travels between the bank and customer is encrypted and can only be decrypted with the public and private key pair. In short, the bank’s server issues a public key to the end user’s browser and creates a temporary private key. These two keys are the only combination possible for that session. When the session is complete, the keys expire and the whole process starts over when a new end user makes a server session.

Router and Firewall: Secure forms must filter through a router and firewall before they are permitted to reach the server. A router, a piece of hardware, works in conjunction with the firewall, a piece of software, to block and direct traffic coming to the server. The configuration begins by disallowing ALL traffic and then opens holes only when necessary to process acceptable data requests, such as retrieving web pages or sending customer requests to the bank.

Using the above technologies, your Internet loan application and check reorder transactions are secure.

Questions?

Call 715-387-1122 or contact us.