Client Privacy Policy
Cooke & Bieler has always and will continue to vigilantly guard the client’s privacy and unauthorized access to the personal information to which the client has entrusted us. Above all, this means the firm will not sell any personal information to any third parties without the client’s consent. Further, Cooke & Bieler will not share or disclose any personal information about the client or the client’s account with third parties unless: Cooke & Bieler receives the client’s prior written consent; we believe the recipient is the client’s authorized representative; we believe we are required or permitted by law to disclose information to the recipient; the client has directed us to disclose the information to the recipient; or we believe the disclosure is necessary in order to provide the client with Cooke & Bieler’s services.
Cooke & Bieler collects and maintains the client’s personal information from the client, the client’s legal representative, or the custodian bank at the time of account establishment and periodically, as changes occur, so we can provide investment management services to the client. The information we collect and maintain about the client may include:
– Name, address and phone number
– Social security or tax identification number
– Assets
– Income
– Investment activity
This personal data, as well as any ancillary information that may come into Cooke & Bieler’s possession during the course of normal business (such as brokers who execute trades on your behalf), will only be used by Cooke & Bieler for purposes of opening and maintaining account information, facilitating smooth flow of executing orders, and maintaining the client’s investment portfolio.
In addition, our Internet Privacy Policy applies to information we receive from our website www.cooke-bieler.com and from incoming email. We do not collect personally identifiable information about you when you visit our website, unless you voluntarily provide it to us by completing the “Contact Us” page or by sending us an email. If you choose to share with us personal information using either of these methods, we will retain it in our electronic communications archive.
Even if you do not share personal information with us, our website still may collect some information about you that does not personally identify you. We are not unique in this regard, as this is a common practice of many businesses’ websites. For example, we use a service provider to gather internet addresses that bring visitors to our website, IP addresses of visitors to our website, statistics about which pages on our website are most often visited, dates and times our website is visited, how long visitors remain on each page, general geographic information about website visitors, types of browsers and devices used to access our website, etc. Our service provider uses cookies to collect this data and provides us with statistics in an aggregated format. We use these statistics in our ongoing efforts to improve our website. If you want to prevent cookies from being set on your device or to opt-out of this type of data collection, you can change your internet browser’s configuration or settings.
To maintain our privacy commitment at Cooke & Bieler, we have instituted firm-wide practices to safeguard the information that we maintain about the client. These practices include adopting policies and procedures to place physical, electronic and other safeguards to keep your personal information safe.
As Cooke & Bieler strives to maintain our obligations to federal laws and any applicable state laws and to continue to protect client privacy, Cooke & Bieler will deliver our current policy to clients on an annual basis. Should the relationship become inactive in the future, we will continue to protect a client’s personal information in the same manner as when the client relationship was active.