Privacy policy

WAM Lending values your patronage and protecting your personal information is a priority. We believe in protecting the confidentiality and security of the information we collect about you as a customer, potential customer, former customer, job applicant, or employee. We have adopted the following policies and procedures to safeguard the personal information about you in our possession.

Introduction

This policy (“Privacy Policy”) discloses the information WAM Lending and its parent, subsidiary, and affiliate companies collect and process, as well as the choices you can make about the way your information is collected and used. This notice also explains how personally identifiable information that you provide or that we may request will be used. We also detail below our security policy which describes how your personal information is protected both electronically and physically.

Based on the products and services you obtain, or employment with WAM Lending you may have sought or obtained, and/or different laws that may apply to you, additional privacy notices may be provided to you.

By using any of our products or services and/or by applying for employment with WAM Lending, you acknowledge and agree to the privacy practices we describe in this Privacy Policy. You also acknowledge that you have read this policy and other policies described below.

Who We Are

For the purposes of this policy, by “WAM Lending and its Affiliate companies” or “WAM Lending” we mean WAM Lending and any of its parents, affiliates, subsidiaries, and joint ventures. This policy does not apply to companies that are not related to WAM Lending through common ownership (“non-Affiliates"). Data practices of non-Affiliates are governed by their own privacy policies.

Information We Collect About You

Information You Provide Us

We collect information that you provide us and through your use of our site. Information collection occurs when you provide us your information to apply for a mortgage, financial product, or other product or service, or when you purchase another product or service from us; when you are referred to us through one of our affiliates or joint ventures, or partners; when you communicate with us via third-party platforms, participate in a contest, promotion, or survey; when you request customer support or information about our products or services; or when you otherwise communicate with us. In addition, job applicants, current employees, and former employees may provide us information necessary to apply for a job and or to obtain or retain benefits during and after employment.

The information we collect depends on the context in which you provide it, and may include:

  • Identifiers such as full name, alias, unique personal identifier, online identifier, Internet Protocol address, email address, postal address, phone number.
  • Demographic information such as race, ethnicity, age, and gender that may be gathered in accordance with federal or state requirements.
  • Sensitive personal information, which may include social security, driver’s license, state identification card, government identification card, or passport number; account log-in, financial account number in combination with any required security or access code, password, or credentials allowing access to the account.
  • Home ownership status, location, and approximate value of your property, as well as photos of your property.
  • Loan, real estate, or financial or credit products or services you have used in the past.
  • Financial information, such as income, assets, savings, investments, liabilities, and net worth.
  • Bank account information.
  • Employment or professional history or status and education information.
  • Insurance information.
  • Other profile data, including your interests and preferences.
  • Information for fraud detection and prevention (including your photo).
  • Any other information you may choose to provide.
Information We Collect

We collect information about you to help us serve your financial, real estate, insurance, credit, and homeownership-related needs; to provide you with quality products and services; and to fulfill legal and regulatory requirements. We consider non-public information about you in our possession to be personally identifiable information, even if you cease to be a customer. The personally identifiable information we collect about you may include:

  • Identifying information, such as your name, age, address, phone number, and social security number.
  • Employment information.
  • Contact information (such as first and last name, mailing or property address, phone number, email address).
  • Account access information, such as username and password.
  • Demographic information (such as date of birth, gender, marital status, ethnicity, race).
  • Social security, driver’s license, passport, and other government identification numbers.
  • Loan account information (such as loan number).
  • Bank account and credit/debit card numbers.
  • Other personal information needed from you to provide real estate-related, loan-related, insurance-related, credit-related, and homeownership-related services to you.
  • Information for fraud detection and prevention.
  • Financial information such as your income, assets, and liabilities, as well as information about your savings, investments, insurance, and business.

Typically, we collect this information on applications and other forms you complete; through conversations you may have with our loan originators, processors, representatives, and agents; through our service partners; through third parties, such as realtors, home builders, and marketing companies; and in some cases, through our website, online tools, virtual chatbots, and digital applications. We may also collect information from a wide range of other sources to process and/or underwrite your loan, assist you in your real estate transaction(s), participate in the settlement of your loan, or otherwise provide you with loan, credit, insurance, or homeownership-related products and services. These sources may include, among others, lenders, mortgage brokers, employers, attorneys, banks, title insurers, insurance companies, credit reporting agencies, and partners for which, if necessary, we will provide you notice before sharing information and/or that we obtain your consent.

How We Use Your Information

We use certain of your information to pull a credit report from a credit bureau to determine your creditworthiness as well as to help our underwriters to assess your loan request in the context of your overall financial situation. We will also use your required and optional information to facilitate activities and transactions that need to occur during the lending, title, escrow, loan settlement, real estate transaction, and other product and service transaction processes such as:

  • Maintaining regular communications with you as may be necessary to execute loan application, loan agreement, and certain stipulations such as identity verification, income verification, and employment verification; to settle your mortgage loan, issue title insurance, and perform other title, escrow, and other loan settlement processes; to assist you in a real estate transaction and related-real estate mortgage origination and real estate settlement processes; or to otherwise complete your credit, loan, real estate, or homeownership-related transaction.
  • Enabling our affiliates and partners to communicate with you about the loan settlement process, real estate transaction, title insurance, and other related services and processes.
  • Contacting you if there is a problem completing a transaction you requested or to discuss a problem with your account, loan application, transaction, or product or service request.
  • Informing you about available products and services.
  • Enabling our financial services partners to implement automatic payments and funds transfer.
  • Implementing collection activities as needed.

We may also use this information to analyze and improve our performance. You may find out more about how we use your personal financial identifiable information here.

In addition, we gather names and email addresses of people who contact us through our website with questions about our company or lending operations. We collect this information for the sole purpose of responding to such inquiries and do not store the contact information unless requested by these people.

Lastly, we (and/or our service providers) collect information about your computer and your visits to our website, such as your IP address, geographical location, browser type, referral source, length of visit, and page views through the use of log files. We (and/or our service providers) use this aggregated information in the administration of our website to improve its usability and to evaluate the success of particular marketing/advertising campaigns, search engine optimization strategies, and other marketing activities. We (and/or our service providers) use non-identifying and aggregated information to help optimize our website based on the needs of our users. Additionally, third parties may collect certain similar information about your computer and other pages you may visit when you visit our website, as discussed further below.

Safeguarding Personally Identifiable Information

We have adopted policies and procedures designed to protect your personally identifiable information from unauthorized use or disclosure. We have implemented physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to maintain confidentiality and integrity of the personal information in our possession and to guard against unauthorized access. These include, among other things, procedures for controlling access to your files, building security programs, and information technology security measures such as the use of passwords, firewalls, virus prevention, and use detection software. We continue to assess new technology as it becomes available and to upgrade our physical and electronic security systems as appropriate. Our policy is to permit employees to access your personal information only if they have a business purpose for using such information, such as administering, providing, or developing our products or services. Our policy, which governs the conduct of all of our employees, requires all employees to safeguard personally identifiable information about the consumers and customers we serve or have served in the past.

WAM Lending Security Policy

WAM Lending takes steps to safeguard your personal and sensitive information through industry-standard physical, electronic, and operational policies and practices. All data that is considered highly confidential can only be read or written through defined service access points, the use of which is password-protected. The physical security of the data is achieved through a combination of network firewalls and servers with tested operating systems, all housed in a secure facility. Access to the system, both physical and electronic, is controlled and sanctioned by a high-ranking manager.

Children’s Privacy

WAM Lending does not direct or provide its products or services to children under 16 nor knowingly solicits or collects information from children.

Links to Third Party Websites

WAM Lending is not responsible for the information practices employed by sites linked to or from our website. In most cases, links to non-WAM Lending websites are provided solely as an access point to obtain information on products and topics that may be useful to the users of the WAM Lending website. Third-party websites may have different privacy policies and/or security standards governing their sites.

Testimonials

We display personal testimonials of satisfied customers on our site in addition to other endorsements. With your consent, we may post your testimonial along with your name. If you wish to update or delete your testimonial, you can contact us at info@wamlending.com.

Notifications

WAM Lending will send you email notifications from time to time, and these are required elements of your transactions on our website, such as confirmations of particular actions you have taken. These required notices are sent typically to notify you of a change in status such as when you are confirmed as a borrower or for other legal or security purposes. For example, certain notifications are sent for your protection to ensure that no one can make a change to your account without your knowledge, such as confirming the addition of a new email address or linked external bank account. These notifications are sent to you so that you can be assured that no one is making changes to your account without your knowledge. In other cases, these notifications involve changes to various legal agreements, terms and condition updates, and privacy policy update notifications. Generally, you may not opt out of these service-related emails.

Sharing Information with Companies That Provide Services for Us

We share personally identifiable information about you, as required or permitted by law, with third parties, such as service providers who assist us in the administration, processing, closing, settlement, title or other insuring, servicing, and sale of your loan, or other service providers who assist us in fulfilling products and services for you. These third parties include, among others, loan origination system providers, lenders, title companies, appraisers, insurance companies, real estate companies, underwriting services, notary services, processing services, printing companies, document providers, software and technology providers, fraud detection companies, marketing services providers, and purchasers of loans. Our policy is to require third-party service providers to enter into confidentiality agreements with us, prohibiting them from using any personally identifiable information they obtain for any purpose other than those for which they were retained or as required by law. We may also disclose information about you, when necessary or required, in legal and arbitration proceedings and to government agencies.

Where You Can Find and/or Correct Your Information

You can access most of your personal information that we collect online and maintain by visiting your profile in the Login section of our site. This section of the site is password-protected to better safeguard your information. As an applicant or a borrower, you can update your password, email address, physical address, phone number, and bank account information at any time on the website, and if you need to change any other information in your profile you can contact us at info@wamlending.com.

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Cookies and tracking

Introduction

This Cookies Policy explains how WAM Lending uses cookies and similar technologies to collect and store information when you visit our websites. By using our website, you agree to the use of cookies and similar technologies as described in this policy.

What are Cookies?

Cookies are small text files sent by a web server to a web browser and stored by the browser. The text file is then sent back to the server each time the browser requests a page from the server. This enables the web server to identify and track the web browser and load the pages according to a user’s preferences, including the personalization of content.

Types of Cookies We Use

Essential Cookies

These cookies are required to make our website function properly and cannot be turned off in our systems. If you block these cookies, portions of our website may not function properly.

Performance and Functional Cookies

These cookies allow us to count visits and sources of traffic on our website so we can measure and improve performance and functionality. They help us know which pages of our website are most and least popular and how visitors move around the website.

Targeted Advertising Cookies

These cookies may be set through our website by our advertising partners. They may be used by advertising companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant advertisements on other websites.

Social Media Cookies

These cookies allow you to share information using social media sharing buttons on social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, or Twitter. This information may then be used by the social media network to deliver targeted advertising to you.

How We Use Cookies

WAM Lending uses cookies to gather statistical data such as which pages are visited, what is downloaded, the ISP’s domain name and country of origin, and the addresses of sites visited before and after coming to our site. This data is aggregated for analysis to ensure proper functioning of our site in terms of navigation and usability, as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing activities.

Protection and Security

Using cookies also helps us protect the security of your account. Encrypted session ID cookies follow your activities on our site so that we can ensure that no one is making changes to your profile, applying for loans, or making loans on your behalf.

Cookies Use By Our Service Providers

We also use third-party tracking services that use cookies or other tracking technology to track non-personal information about visitors to our site in the aggregate. These include web page views, other sites visited, and referral page information to track the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns.

Managing Cookies

Most browsers allow you to refuse to accept cookies and to delete cookies. Blocking cookies, however, can have a negative impact on the usability of many websites.

Here are some resources on how to manage cookies for different browsers:

Behavioral Tracking and Web Session Recording Technologies

When you visit our website, we use site visit recording technologies to memorialize site visits, third-party cookies, beacons, tags, and scripts to help collect the categories of information described above and aggregated information from your internet browser. This helps us provide the best digital experience, diagnose usability problems, identify areas for improvement, help personalize user experience on our website, better understand your preferences, and operate our business.

Consent

By using our website, you agree to our use of cookies and similar tracking technologies as described in this Cookies Policy. You may withdraw your consent at any time by managing your cookie preferences through your browser settings.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about our use of cookies or other technologies, please email us at info@wamlending.com.

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INFORMATION FOR CALIFORNIA CONSUMERS

WAM Lending values your privacy and is committed to protecting your personal information. This California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) Policy provides information about your rights under the CCPA and explains how WAM Lending collects, uses, and discloses personal information of California residents.

Your CCPA Rights

As a California resident, you have the following rights under the CCPA:

  1. Right to Know: You have the right to request that we disclose what personal information we collect, use, disclose, and sell.
  2. Right to Delete: You have the right to request the deletion of your personal information that we collect or maintain.
  3. Right to Opt-Out: You have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information.
  4. Right to Non-Discrimination: You have the right not to receive discriminatory treatment for exercising your CCPA rights.

Information We Collect

We may collect the following categories of personal information:

  • Identifiers: Such as your name, address, email address, phone number, and Social Security number.
  • Personal Information Categories: Such as your signature, physical characteristics, financial information, and medical information.
  • Protected Classifications: Such as race, gender, and age.
  • Commercial Information: Such as records of products or services purchased.
  • Biometric Information: Such as fingerprints.
  • Internet Activity: Such as browsing history and interactions with our website.
  • Geolocation Data: Such as physical location.
  • Sensory Data: Such as audio, electronic, visual, or similar information.
  • Professional or Employment Information: Such as job history and performance evaluations.
  • Education Information: Such as educational history.
  • Inferences: Such as profiles reflecting preferences and characteristics.

How We Use Your Information

We may use the personal information we collect for the following purposes:

  • Providing, maintaining, and improving our services.
  • Processing transactions and sending related information.
  • Communicating with you, including responding to your inquiries.
  • Personalizing and improving the user experience on our website.
  • Complying with legal obligations and resolving disputes.
  • Conducting research and analysis.

How We Share Your Information

We may share your personal information with:

  • Service Providers: Companies that provide services to us, such as payment processing, data analysis, and customer service.
  • Affiliates: Companies that are related to us by common ownership or control.
  • Third Parties: Other companies for joint marketing purposes or as required by law.

Exercising Your CCPA Rights

To exercise your CCPA rights, please contact us by:

  • Email: info@wamlending.com
  • Mail: WAM Lending, Attn: Privacy Team, 100 Bayview Cir 100, Newport Beach, CA 92660

When submitting a request, please include your full name, contact information, and details of your request. We may need to verify your identity before processing your request.

Non-Discrimination

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your CCPA rights. This means we will not deny you goods or services, charge you different prices or rates, or provide you with a different level or quality of goods or services for exercising your rights under the CCPA.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this CCPA Policy from time to time. When we make changes, we will notify you by updating the date at the top of this policy and, in some cases, we may provide additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or sending you an email notification).

Contact Us

If you have any questions or comments about this CCPA Policy, the ways in which we collect and use your information, or your choices and rights regarding such use, please contact us at:

  • Email: info@wamlending.com
  • Mail: WAM Lending, Attn: Privacy Team, 100 Bayview Cir 100, Newport Beach, CA 92660

This policy is effective as of August 5, 2024.

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