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Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy for NACM, including FCIB, CFDD and NACM Canada members and STS/MLBS Clients

NACM strives for transparency and trust when it comes to protecting your privacy and our goal is to clearly explain how we collect and process your information. It’s important to us that you enjoy the benefits of your membership and the use of our products, services and website(s) without compromising your privacy in any way. NACM’s goal is to be your destination for credit related information and education by conveniently providing information, services, and product offerings that are most relevant to you.

This policy outlines how and why we collect and use different types of personal and behavioral information. You have the right to access, change or delete your personal information at any time; you can find out more about this and your rights in our Right to Be Forgotten Section. Alternatively, you can get in touch directly with a member of our Membership Team.

You should read this policy in conjunction with our Cookies Policy and Terms of Use and ensure that you understand how we collect and use your information.

Our policies will be updated from time-to-time. Please refer back regularly to keep yourself updated.

This policy applies to “users” and “members” of NACM, CFDD, FCIB and NACM Canada (or “you”); that is any member of NACM, CFDD, FCIB and NACM Canada and anyone ordering, registering or interacting with any product or service from any of NACM’s businesses or business units. This includes event registrants, subscribers, website users, app users, visitors, etc. This policy applies to members, customers and clients of NACM and its subsidiary companies and business units such as Secured Transaction Services and Mechanics’ Lien & Bond Services and those visiting our websites. Within this policy, “we” means NACM, CFDD, FCIB, NACM Canada, Secured Transaction Services, Business Credit magazine. “We” means NACM and its subsidiaries.

Information we collect

Some of the information we collect about you is passed to us by your NACM Affiliate and/or your CFDD Chapter so that your NACM and/or CFDD membership is active. NACM National, FCIB and NACM Canada members provide us directly with information to activate their memberships. Likewise, if you inquire about NACM membership via our website, we will pass your information to the geographically closest NACM Affiliate, based on your zip code, for follow-up.

As you establish your relationship with us, you also provide us the information we need to provide you with our services and products or to respond to your questions. There is certain personal information that we need in order to provide you with the benefits of your membership and/or the products and services that you have chosen. NACM does not collect personal information from those merely browsing our websites.

Examples of details we may receive or collect to activate your membership or provide you with a service include:

  • Name
  • Job Title
  • Company
  • Shipping address (including zip code or postcode)
  • Physical address (including zip code or postcode)
  • Country
  • Telephone number (company and/or direct and/or mobile)
  • Fax number
  • Email address
  • Payment details (membership start and end dates, payment method)
  • Business Type (SIC or NAICS codes or general line of business description)

We also may collect additional information about you as you apply for professional designations, register for events or complete surveys. The additional information could include: emergency contact information, month and day of birth, mobile phone number, line of business, or other information you supply as you interact with events, programs or services.

Information we collect through your use of our products

When you register to attend an event (such as a conference, seminar, class or webinar) or when you purchase a product (such as a book, online course or learning module) or service (such as applying for a professional designation, responding to a survey, purchasing an international credit report or newsletter or an STS construction offering) we record the information about your engagement or purchase with us in your member or customer record. When you login to any one of our web sites, we record (in your member or customer record) the date and time of your last login. When you subscribe and open one of our electronic newsletters or participate in a survey, we record that action in your member or customer record. When you use any of our apps, we collect information that helps us to deliver the service you have chosen and to improve your experience. This is done through cookies and other technologies.

Examples of the type of information we may collect are: information of computer and navigation patterns when visitors come to our websites, including Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, the computer’s operating system, the type of browser and device used, and the specific web pages visited during connection and general regional location of the user. We may also track data such as the total number of visits to our website and the number of visitors to each page of the website.

You may volunteer to disclose additional information which may not be essential for us to deliver a service to you. By providing it, you help us to ensure we communicate with you in a way that is most relevant, useful and engaging for you.
We may collect and ask for additional information when you order, purchase, register, subscribe or make use of our products or services via our marketing campaigns, via telephone or online orders, or our websites.

Information we do not track

We do not track or collect any sensitive information about you such as race, religion, ethnicity, and political opinion or affiliation. We do not establish a permanent password for you but rather we provide you with a temporary password and rely upon to you choose your own personal, secure password to our websites. Although your password is stored in our database so that it can be compared to the one you use when you login, your password is encrypted with non-reversible encryption so that we cannot tell what the password is. At no point can we view, access or know your password. If you forget your password, we ask that you reset it.

How we use your information

Generally, NACM and its subsidiaries use data collected to improve its own web or editorial content, to respond to your interests, needs and preferences, and to develop new products and services. We primarily use your information for the purpose of delivering benefits of your membership, the products and services that you chose and to personalize our interactions (including marketing) with you.

We use your information:

  • to provide products and services and to fulfill orders for purchased products and services.
  • to manage your access to our online content and apps and to send you content via push notifications about services and events, newsletters and subscriptions.
  • to send you service notifications related to your membership, products or services such as subscription renewal notifications, password resets and order confirmations.
  • to manage your customer service inquiries and complaints.
  • to manage your privacy preferences and to ensure you only receive communications that you have requested, which may include using your preference details to suppress communications to you.
  • to send you administrative emails about your membership and your organization, including election notices, bylaws change notices, etc.
  • to run contests, prize drawings and promotions or if you agree to be a speaker or contributor at, or in, one of our events or publications. In these cases, subject to any specific terms, you grant a global right to NACM to use your name, picture, likeness, voice, biographical information and statements, for advertising, publicity and promotional purposes in all media now known or discovered afterwards and on the internet.
  • to deliver marketing and advertising.

If you have inquired about NACM membership, we pass your information to the Affiliate within closest geographic proximity to you, determined by your zip code.

If you are a citizen in a country that requires us to gain your consent to use your information for some specific purposes such as marketing and personalized advertising, you are provided with access to your account to manage all of your preferences. We will ask you if you wish to opt-in or opt-out of such marketing messages when you first sign up for membership and every time you receive an electronic communication from us.

You can update your preferences at any time via your online account at www.nacm.org or www.fcibglobal.com or by contacting us by phone at +1 410-740-5560 or by email at info@nacm.org. You can opt out of email marketing messages by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of each of our emails. Opt-outs do not apply to important association or service notifications such as payment confirmations or where we have some other obligation or legal basis for contacting you.

We may send marketing communications via a range of channels including email and push notifications and you can opt out of these at any time. If you give us marketing permission, we may contact you to tell you about special offers and related or similar products or services.

In order to deliver advertising and marketing messages that are relevant to you, we may use the information we hold about you, including details that we collate from your use of our services, such as more precise information on your company’s line of business, something you have attended or purchased in the past, to ensure that the advertising you see is of interest to you.

Other uses of your information

Other than where we have asked for your consent, we use your information to provide our products or services to you, in accordance with our duty to fulfill your membership value proposition. We may use your information:

  • To measure customer and user response and engagement with our products and services such as online content, email newsletters and subscription offers.
  • To ensure our products (including websites and apps) are compatible with the browsers and operating systems used by most of our visitors.
  • To help us improve our customer and user experience and to support new product development. We may send customer satisfaction or event evaluation surveys and business research questionnaires.
  • To create audience profiles for personalized advertising, marketing or research and development on and off our websites.
  • For any purpose required by law or regulation and to verify information that we may provide to third-parties for compliance and audit purposes such as the Business Publications Audit (BPA) Worldwide, we may share your personal data with a third-party auditing organization so they can verify aggregated statistics about circulation and usage of our publications or review our policies, processes and procedures for compliance with relevant standards.

You have the right to object to any of the above uses of your information, please contact us at info@nacm.org if you wish to do so. We will consider all objections reasonably, but there may be legal reasons where we deem that the use of your information is still appropriate. We will explain our decision to you in a timely manner.

Legal basis for collecting and using your information

There are several legal bases for our collection and use of your personal information:

  • For the legitimate interests of NACM, including the several uses listed in this policy;
  • To perform a contract;
  • Based on consent; and
  • Legal compliance. 

Social media

NACM and FCIB publish content on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We do not have access to your personal account data on your social media platforms although we may consult these platforms to verify such personal information as a job title, an email address or place of employment.

How we work with third-parties

In some instances, we disclose personal information to third-party partners whenever it is necessary to deliver a service or product, or to help us improve your experience with us, or when we are required to do so by law. “Third-parties” include the United States Postal Service, United Parcel Service (UPS) and other such mail and delivery services or mail houses. We may disclose personal information to our third-party partners who offer benefit of membership programs and discounts such as United TranzActions, GEICO and UPS. We ensure the information remains secure and limited in use, and if we do not have a legitimate business reason to pass on your information, we will ask you to give consent first.

Some examples of when we share your information are below:

  • When you make a payment on any of our sites your payment will be processed by a payment processor to ensure a secure transaction. All payment processors used by NACM are compliant with required security standards.
  • When we send you an email or a push notification delivered by using a third-party platform. As part of this service, certain information is passed to us such as message opens, clicks and formatting are recorded to help deliver the best email experience.
  • When you take an online course or exam hosted by a third-party partner, we pass your personal information to create a personal account for you and our third-party partner passes information back to us about your actions, such as your progress in the course, quiz and exam grades, the time you spent online and course completion information.

In some instances, a third party will disclose information about you to us. For example, if you register to attend a conference or event and make a reservation at the hotel at which we are hosting the event, it is likely that the hotel will share your name and reservation check in and check out date details with us. We cross reference hotel information with our registration data.

Retaining and storing your information

Retention policy

We securely store your information and hold it for as long as we need to in order to continue to provide you with continuous benefits of your membership, maintain your professional designation status, fulfill orders or as long as necessary for us to fulfill our promises and obligations to you. We may also retain and use your information to the extent necessary to satisfy our legitimate interests, comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.
We review periodically our retention periods for personal information. If you have not interacted with us in any way, we will generally retain your information for tax and other financial regulatory reasons but we will not contact you after 5 years other than to continue mail you Business Credit magazine or other newsletters that are part of your member benefits, so long as your membership is active.

If you request for us to no longer contact you, for example with marketing communications, we will retain the minimum amount of information about you so that we can ensure we remove you from any future communications. Please note that if you ask us to completely remove all information about you, and you subsequently use our products and services at a later date, we will no longer be able to recognize your previous request to not be contacted, which is why we would keep it and suppress it in line with industry standards.

Keeping your information safe

We take information security seriously and have reasonable policies and procedures in place to help ensure the information we hold on you remains safe. We limit who has access to your information and ensure that those who do are bound by policies to keep your information availability restricted and safe. Of course no measures provide 100% security, and we cannot guarantee the security of your information from all possible intrusions or breaches.

Site of collection and use of your information

Your information may be collected, stored, and processed in the United States, European Union, or any other country in which we, our vendors, or partners maintain facilities. NACM generally collects and processes information in the US. In the event personal data is collected in the EU and is then transferred to the US, or is transferred to any other country outside of the EU, we will do so because there is a legal reason, such as in order to perform a contract, or to achieve a legitimate interest of NACM.

External links

This privacy policy only applies to NACM’s use of data. Our websites may contain links to, use links, or appear as a link on external sites. We are not responsible for the privacy policies or the content of external sites and we recommend that you read the privacy policies on any external sites you use. Similarly, if you are directed to our website from a third-party, we are not responsible for the privacy policy or practices of the third-party. We recommend you read their policy.

Cookies

Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer’s hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the sites or service providers systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information. We use cookies and web beacons to understand and save your preferences for future visits. A web beacon is one of various techniques used on web pages or email, to unobtrusively (usually invisibly) allow checking that a user has accessed some content. Web beacons are used for email tracking and page tagging for web analytics such as Google Analytics.

If you prefer, you can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent, or you can choose to turn off all cookies via your browser settings. Like most websites, if you turn your cookies off, some of our web pages, web forms and service request forms may not function properly. You may place orders for most products and services over the telephone.

Terms of Use

NACM strives at all times to provide useful and accurate information to help users understand how to navigate and excel in the field of business credit. It is your responsibility to make sure that anything you read or choose to use is accurate, up-to-date, and applies to your situation. If you use information from our sites, before relying on it, we recommend that you check the information with a secondary authoritative source. The information and materials available through NACM’s websites are for informational and educational purposes only and are not a substitute for professional legal advice. By using our sites, you consent to our online privacy policy.

Copyright

The entire contents of all of NACM websites, including www.nacm.org, www.fcibglobal.com, www.nacmsts.com, creditcongress.nacm.org and www.tradecreditreport.com, are copyrighted, unless otherwise indicated, by NACM. All rights are reserved and content may not be reproduced, downloaded, disseminated, published, or transferred, in any form or by any means, except with the prior written agreement of NACM. Users of our sites may download/print pages or other content for their personal, noncommercial use on a single computer. Any information contained on web sites linked from NACM’s sites are not copyrighted by NACM, but may be copyrighted by the owner(s) of such linked web site(s). This copyright notice also binds visitors linking to this site from other web sites. Articles are not authorized for duplication or distribution without express permission from NACM.

Trademarks

The trademarked/registered NACM logo may not be used in connection with any product or service that is not NACM’s or specifically endorsed by NACM. Logos of NACM, including the NACM, FCIB, CFDD and STS logos may not be used without the express permission of NACM. If web pages are downloaded and/or printed, the NACM logo cannot be used for other purposes subsequent to the download(s), without express written permission from NACM.

Right to Be Forgotten/Right to Erasure

If you are a resident or citizen of a country within the EU, you can request the removal of your personal data at any time by contacting us by writing to us at NACM, 8840 Columbia 100 Parkway, Columbia, MD 20145-2158, USA. This right is not absolute, however. For example, as long as you maintain a business relationship with NACM (e.g., as a member, customer, subscriber, certificant), we may retain and use your information. We may have other legitimate interests in retaining your information, such as to fulfill a contract or in the event of a legal claim. After receiving your written request, we may contact you to confirm that the request was originated by you. We will strive to complete the removal of all of your personal data within one month of receiving your removal instructions, with the understanding that, as stated above, we are entitled to retain your data for certain purposes regardless of a request to the contrary, and, further, some financial or other detail may be retained to comply with NACM’s corporate governance policy or to meet audit guidelines and/or financial regulations. If you ask us to remove your personal data, we will be unable to restore it after we have complied with your request.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

As we update or change our privacy policy, the changes will appear on this page. This policy was last modified on May 25, 2018.

Contacting Us

If you have any questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us using the information below.

info@nacm.org
NACM
8840 Columbia 100 Parkway
Columbia, MD 21045
nacm_national@nacm.org
+1 410-740-5560