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Karen Mintz at a Burgundy event
Karen Mintz at a Burgundy event

Privacy and Cookie Policy



Burgundy Asset Management Ltd. (Burgundy) is a discretionary investment manager domiciled in Canada and is a wholly owned indirect subsidiary of Bank of Montreal (together with Burgundy, we or our). We are committed to protecting our clients’ privacy and the confidentiality of their Personal Information in our possession. Personal Information is information about our clients provided by them or that we collect from other sources such as credit reporting agencies, and includes name, address, date of birth, email, tax identification number, and other personal data of clients or their directors, officers, beneficial owners, employees, agents, or representatives. Additionally, we are committed to ensuring that anyone who accesses our website understands what data may be collected, how we may use it, and how to opt out of sharing any information. Here are the ways we fulfill these commitments.

Accountability

We have strict policies and procedures governing how we deal with your Personal Information. Each and every one of our employees is responsible for respecting and protecting the Personal Information to which the employee has access.

Our Chief Privacy Officer oversees privacy governance including policy, dispute resolution, education, communications activities and reporting to our Board of Directors on privacy matters. Please refer to Contact Us below for information on how to reach our Chief Privacy Officer.

Identifying Purpose

We are legally required to collect clients’ Personal Information as a result of providing and in order to provide discretionary investment management services to clients. We collect Personal Information about you from applications or forms you may complete, agreements you enter into with us, and in the course of you establishing or maintaining a client relationship with us. All of our forms and the information obtained from clients are designed to collect only information needed for the purposes set out below and for no other purpose. Regulatory requirements include but are not limited to know-your-client requirements and anti-money laundering requirements which are applicable to us as an adviser and fund manager.

We collect and use your Personal Information to:

  • verify your identity;
  • ensure we have accurate information about you;
  • understand your financial needs (including your eligibility for products and services you requested or accepted or were pre-approved for);
  • manage our relationship;
  • protect against fraud and manage other risks;
  • communicate with you regarding products and services that may be of interest (but not to send unsolicited marketing communications);
  • understand our clients, including through analytics, and to develop and tailor our products and services;
  • comply with legal or regulatory requirements, or as required by law; and
  • respond to questions you may have.

If we use your Personal Information for a different purpose, we will identify that purpose.

Consent and Your Choices

When you apply for or accept a new product or service, we obtain your consent to collect, use or disclose your Personal Information for the purposes set out in Principle 2 - Identifying Purpose. Those purposes are with respect to information sharing only, and do not include marketing without your consent. While we may share your Personal Information internally for the purposes noted above, we will not market products to you or send you marketing communications without your consent. You can manage any existing marketing preferences by opting out of some or all of our direct marketing communications, and you can opt in to receive marketing communications from members of the BMO Financial Group. BMO Financial Group means Bank of Montreal and its affiliates that provide deposit, investment, loan, securities, trust, insurance and other products and services.

You may also choose to opt out of having account-specific information shared among the members of BMO Financial Group. If you want to change these privacy preferences, please contact us. If you opt out of certain information sharing, you will still continue to receive information that we are required by law to provide to you, service messages that we need to send to you, and relevant information about our products and services in the course of providing services to you.  Please note that you cannot withdraw your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your Personal Information if:

  • we are legally required to collect, use or disclose your Personal Information,
  • it relates to a credit product we have granted to you where we are required to collect and exchange your Personal Information on an ongoing basis with credit bureaus, credit insurers and other lenders, or
  • it is being shared between two or more members of the BMO Financial Group that are jointly providing you with a product or service.

Withdrawing your consent to share in certain situations may also mean that we may not be able to provide you with the products or services you request.

Limited Collection

We only collect the Personal Information that we determine we need for the purposes set out in Principle 2, Identifying Purpose.

For example, we may collect:

  • Contact Information including address, telephone number and email address.
  • Social Insurance Number (SIN) as required in order to comply with tax requirements. We may use your SIN to help us differentiate you from clients who may have the same or similar name.
  • Financial Information to ensure that the advice and/or products we provide you are appropriate for you and the investments you purchase are suitable for you.
  • Device Information such as information about your operating system, browser, software applications, IP address, geolocation, security status and other device information in order to improve your experience, to protect against fraud and manage risk. For more information, see our Cookie Policy below.
  • Website Use Information such as browsing behavior on our sites and links, location you select, form data and downloads as well as other data gathered from the use of web tools (for example, Cookies, Web Beacons, Tagging).
  • Employment Information, including information about your previous and current employers, to confirm your eligibility for certain products and services.

We may collect Personal Information about you from you and from third parties or sources that are available to the public for the purposes set out in Principle 2 – Identifying Purpose.

You can choose not to provide us with certain information in some situations as noted in Principle 3 - Consent and Your Choices, but if you make this choice, we may not be able to provide you with the product, service, or information you request.

We may monitor or record our incoming or outgoing telephone calls with you to ensure accuracy, security, service quality, for training purposes, to protect you against fraud, and to establish a record.

Limited Use and Disclosure

We will only use or disclose your Personal Information for the purpose(s) it was collected and as otherwise identified in this Privacy Policy.

We do not sell the names or other Personal Information of our clients. We do not disclose the names or other Personal Information of our clients to other companies outside of BMO Financial Group without consent except as set out below, unless required or permitted by law.

We may disclose your Personal Information:

  • Within Burgundy and within BMO Financial Group, including locations outside of Canada where we do business, subject to your choices outlined in Principle 3 – Your Consent and Choices, and for the purposes described in Principle 2 – Identifying Purpose. This sharing allows us to meet regulatory and compliance requirements, offer more integrated products, services and support to you, and ensure we have up-to-date information about you, as well as allowing us to help identify products and services that could benefit you in the future (to be communicated only in accordance with your marketing consent).
  • To businesses we buy or sell. We may also transfer Personal Information as part of a corporate reorganization or other change in corporate control.
  • To a party acting for you or at your request.
  • To a person who holds an account jointly with you.
  • To third parties including legal or regulatory authorities in cases of suspected criminal activity or contravention of law, for the detection and prevention of fraud, or when required to satisfy the legal or regulatory requirements of domestic or international governments, government agencies, tax authorities, securities regulators, regulatory authorities or other self-regulatory organizations, or to comply with a court order or for the protection of our assets (for example, collection of overdue accounts at Bank of Montreal).
  • To affiliates, service providers or other companies to provide services on our behalf such as data processing, issuing cheques, preparing your income tax slips, account administration, analytics and marketing. Such companies will be given only the Personal Information needed to perform those services and we do not authorize them to use or disclose Personal Information for their own marketing or other purposes. We have contracts in place holding these companies to the same standards of confidentiality by which we are governed. In some cases, these other companies may be located outside of your province or Canada (such as in the United States). These companies may be required to disclose information to courts, government authorities, regulators or law enforcement in accordance with applicable law in that country. In some cases, your information may be subject to the laws and access rights of authorities in foreign countries.

Retention

We have policies in place that govern the retention of your Personal Information so it will be kept only for as long as reasonably necessary to fulfill its intended purpose or to satisfy legal requirements.

To determine the appropriate retention period, we consider different criteria, including the purposes for which we hold your Personal Information, the need for maintaining your Personal Information to provide you with products and services, and all applicable legal and regulatory requirements. We may retain Personal Information beyond our designated retention periods due to regulatory requirements, in response to a legal matter, or to serve you better. These requirements also apply to third parties who work with us.

Accuracy

We are committed to maintaining the accuracy of your Personal Information and ensuring it is complete and up-to-date. If you discover inaccuracies in our records, or your Personal Information changes, please notify us immediately so that we can make the necessary changes. Failure to notify us of changes to your Personal Information may negatively impact the way we communicate or provide services to you. Where appropriate, we will advise others of any material amendments to your Personal Information that we may have released to them. If we do not agree to make the amendments that you request, you may challenge our decision as described in Contact Us.

Safeguards

We use physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect against unauthorized use, access, modification, destruction, disclosure, loss or theft of your Personal Information in our custody or control. We have agreements and controls in place with credit bureaus, credit insurers, other lenders and third-party service providers requiring that any information we provide to them must be safeguarded and used only for the purpose of providing the service we have requested the company to perform.

Openness

From time to time, we may make changes to this Privacy Policy. Please go to Contact Us to answer any questions you may have about this Policy.

Individual Access and Rights

You can make a request to access and verify the Personal Information we hold about you. You must make the request in writing to us and we will need specific information from you to process your request. We may charge you a token fee depending on the nature of your request, and we will advise you of any fee prior to proceeding with your request. If we are unable to provide some of the Personal Information we hold about you, we will tell you why.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about our privacy practices, the privacy of your Personal Information, or you want to know more about your privacy choices, or if you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your Personal Information, you can contact our Chief Privacy Officer, who will then investigate the matter:

BMO Financial Group
Office of the Chief Privacy Officer
1 First Canadian Place
P.O. Box 150, Toronto, ON M5X 1H3
[email protected].

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your Personal Information in accordance with applicable law, you may make a complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada:

Call: 1-800-282-1376.
Visit: www.priv.gc.ca.

Cookie Policy

If you access our website, the Client Portal or Mobile Application, certain information about your computer or device will automatically be generated, collected and logged by technological means such as cookies and related technologies like pixel, tags or beacons (collectively referred to as “cookies”). This information may include the type of browser you are using, your general geographic location, device models, iOs version, click rates, and web pages visited. Note that these cookies by themselves do not identify you personally or tell us your email address, and your Internet Protocol (IP) Address is anonymized by default. The data collected is aggregated and used to analyze the number of unique visitors to our site and geographic origin trends, but not to identify individual site visitors.

A notification banner will appear on our website allowing you to manage your consent to collect cookies. Below are the types of cookies we collect and how withholding your consent would affect certain features of the site:

  • Strictly necessary and functional cookies – these are essential to enable users to navigate the website and use its features. They must be enabled and cannot be blocked, or the site will not function properly.
  • Analytics and performance cookies – these gather data to enhance performance of the site. You can manage your consent for performance cookies by using the cookie banner or by updating your browser’s setting (generally under the Tools or Preferences menu) to decline cookies.
  • Advertisement cookies – these are rarely used but may be activated as part of Burgundy promotional campaigns on LinkedIn, for example.

We may, from time to time, use cookies and the information they generate to:

  • Improve your user experience – for example, make certain content or pages more readily accessible.
  • Enable certain website functions – for example, set your language preferences.
  • Provide us with analytics – we use Google Analytics, a third-party analytics tool that helps us understand how visitors use our site, which allows us to improve our content. The data is aggregated and covers things such as total visits or page views.

If you would like to delete cookies or instruct your web browser to delete or refuse cookies, please visit the help pages of your web browser. Note that if you delete or refuse to accept cookies, you might not be able to use all of our website features or to store your preferences, and some of our site pages may not display properly.