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Privacy Policy

Your Privacy. Our Commitment.

This Privacy Policy describes how and why Canaccord Genuity Corp. and its Canadian affiliates including Canaccord Genuity Wealth & Estate Planning Services Ltd. (“we”, “us”, or “our”) protect and handle your personal information. From our beginnings, we have been committed to keeping your information safe and the business you do with us in the strictest confidence. Here are some important terms that we use in this Privacy Policy:

  • “Personal information” or “your information” means information that is about an individual that can be identified.
  • “You” and “your” means you directly, whether you are a client, prospective client, beneficiary, website visitor or otherwise interacting directly with us, or when another person provides us with your information.

This Privacy Policy applies whenever you interact with us and supplements any other terms or agreements that may apply to your relationship with us. If you have any questions regarding the Privacy Policy, you can submit them to our Privacy Officer using the information provided at the end of this Policy under “Contact Us”.

How We Handle Your Personal Information

Types Of Information We Collect

The type of personal information we collect depends on various factors, such as the type of products or services you request or use, any applicable legal and regulatory obligations and the channel through which you communicate with us. This information includes:

  • Contact information that allows us to communicate with you, such as your address, telephone number, email or other electronic address, or social media account username.

  • Credit information that allows us to assess your creditworthiness and manage our risks, including your credit score and credit bureau report. We may also use this information to help verify your identity.

  • Identity information that allows us to establish and verify your identity, including government-issued identification, name, date of birth, address, occupation and answers to security questions. In addition, we are required to obtain your Social Insurance Number (SIN) when opening an investment account.

  • Biometric information, such as the measurement of facial features and voice patterns. We may use biometric information to verify your identity.

  • Financial information that allows us to determine the appropriateness of products or services, such as employment and financial history, income, net worth, and investment knowledge and objectives.

  • Transactional information about your accounts and how you use different products or services, such as transaction history.

  • Health and lifestyle information including family health history, personal activities, behaviours and lifestyle choices that helps us assess your eligibility for life insurance products, calculate appropriate premium rates, administer the insurance and adjudicate claims.

  • Information that you provide about other people. This could be information about beneficiaries or insured spouses, common-law partners or dependents under an insurance product or a registered plan. It could also be information about an authorized user of your account. If you provide us with information about another individual, we will assume you have the authority to provide this information and have obtained their consent to its collection, use and sharing for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy.

  • Online activity information, like your IP address and how you use our app or website, which is obtained from your online interactions with us. See “Interacting With Us Online” below for details.

Where We Collect This Information From

Most of the information we collect comes directly from you. However, we may collect your information from other sources. These other sources include:

  • Other clients or business partners who provide referrals
  • Government agencies, law enforcement authorities, tax authorities, regulators and fraud prevention organizations
  • Other financial institutions, such as when we interact with your bank, or another broker dealer of yours, to transfer funds or securities
  • Credit bureaus, such as Equifax or TransUnion
  • Insurers, when we assist you in obtaining insurance coverage or managing your insurance policies and needs
  • People who have the legal authority to act on your behalf, such as under a power of attorney
  • Individuals whose information you provide us, like a trusted contact person
  • Other third parties we may interact with when managing an estate, such as beneficiaries or estate trustees

How and Why We Handle Your Information 

We collect and use your information to: 

  • Verify your identity
  • Communicate and manage our relationship with you
  • Provide our products and services and personalize them to meet your objectives
  • Assess your creditworthiness
  • Manage and assess our operations and risks
  • Train our personnel
  • Protect both you and us against error, fraud and unauthorized use, and to investigate potential misconduct
  • Better understand you and your objectives so that we can offer and recommend products and services to meet your needs
  • Conduct internal analytics to identify trends, improve or develop new products and services, and inform how we do business
  • Assess and engage in business transactions, such as the purchase or sale of all or part of a business or its assets
  • Protect our property, interests, and legal rights
  • Comply with legal and regulatory requirements

To perform these activities, we may share your information with our affiliates as well as third parties to perform services on our behalf. We use service providers to:

  • Support our internal business operations (like our compliance and human resources functions)
  • Verify your identity, including with biometrics
  • Assist with IT functions, such as operating and protecting our website, client portal, app and other IT assets
  • Improve our ability to communicate and manage our relationship with you
  • Help identify products and services that may be of interest to you
  • Obtain professional advice and services, such as from lawyers or accountants

 Interacting With Us Online

We use certain technologies and tracking tools on our website and app, such as cookies.  Cookies are snippets of data stored by a web browser (for example, Chrome, Safari or Firefox web browsers).  We also use pixels, beacons, web analytics services, and other technologies. These tools provide us with information about your usage of our website and app. This information helps us operate, improve and protect our website and app.  We, and third parties we permit, may use these tools to track which of our ads you interact with on our website and on the websites of companies who help us advertise. We may use this information for analytics and reporting, to learn more about how you interact with us, and/or promote our products and services. You can review our Cookies Policy on our website and manage your cookie preferences there.

When using our app, we may collect technical information about your usage of the app and your device. Device information can include a device ID and what kind of operating system your device is using. The ability to access certain personal information can be managed through your device settings and the app’s settings. Your device support will have instructions for how to manage these permissions.

Disclosing Your Information 

We may disclouse your information under the following circumstances: 

  • To fund companies or other issuers of investment products or securities that you invest in
  • To insurers, when we assist you in obtaining insurance coverage or managing your insurance policies and needs. The insurer’s privacy policy will have details about how they handle your personal information
  •  To financial institutions in connection with our products and services, such as when we transfer funds to or from your bank account, or transferring a brokerage account to another broker
  • To beneficiaries, estate executors, trustees or representatives, bankruptcy trustees and similar parties in relation to performing our estate or wealth management services
  • To trusted contact persons, powers of attorney (or individuals authorized to act on your behalf), regulators or law enforcement authorities to prevent or investigate financial abuse or other unauthorized activity
  • To government agencies, regulators, self-regulatory organizations, regulated marketplaces or law enforcement to comply with legal requirements, prevent fraud and other illegal activity, and respond to requests for information that we determine to be legitimate
  • Any other person or organization with your direction or consent

Our Privacy Practices

How We Protect Your Information 

We have implemented administrative, technical and physical safeguards designed to protect personal information in our custody and control against unauthorized access, use, modification and disclosure. Only authorized personnel have access to your information. Our procedures and systems are designed to protect your information from error, loss and unauthorized access. We also have policies for the destruction and retention of your information (see “Destruction and Retention” below) and the handling of privacy-related questions and complaints (see “Your Rights” and “Contact Us” below). Each and every one of our employees is responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of all personal information to which they have access. As a condition of employment, our employees are required to sign a confidentiality agreement binding them to this responsibility. We keep your information only as long as required by applicable rules and regulations, and we monitor our compliance in conjunction with privacy legislation.

International Storage

We are a global organization, with affiliates and service providers located across Canada and in other countries. We and our service providers may use, store or access your information in any region in Canada and other countries.  These countries may include the USA, UK, European states, or others.  We take measures to protect your information wherever it is handled.  However, like in Canada, we and our service providers may disclose your information in response to valid demands or requests made by governments, regulators, courts and law enforcement authorities in these other regions.

Destruction and Retention

We retain your information only as long as we need it for the purposes we collected it. We have procedures to help us determine the appropriate length of time we will retain your information. The length of time we retain the information depends on the product or service, the sensitivity of the information, and the purposes for which we use it. This period may extend beyond the end of your relationship with us in certain circumstances, including:

  • when we need your information to respond to issues that may arise at a later date,
  • or legal or regulatory purposes, and
  • for security and business modelling purposes.

We have procedures to guide what we do when we no longer need your information for these purposes. We may securely destroy, delete, erase it, or convert it to an anonymous form.

You can contact us using the contact information below if you have questions about how long we retain your information.

Automated Decisions 

In some cases, we may use technology to make automated decisions about you in real time. When this occurs, we may notify you in advance of the decision, for example, during the client onboarding process some decisions may be automated. We will also tell you how you can contact us to learn more about the automated decision process, but you can always contact our Privacy Officer using the information provided below if you have any questions.

Your Privacy Choices And Rights

Your Choices

Subject to legal, business or contract requirements, you can withdraw your consent to our collection, use and sharing of information at any time by giving us reasonable notice. However, withdrawing your consent may limit or prevent us from providing you with, or being able to continue to provide you with, specific products and services. For example, if you choose not to provide us with your SIN, we will not be able to provide you with any product where the collection of a SIN is required by law.

Some other choices you have include:

  • Unsubscribing from marketing or promotional emails
  • Managing your cookies preferences (see “Interacting With Us Online” above)
  • Telling us about your other communication preferences, by contacting our Privacy Officer, or, if applicable, with your Canaccord Genuity investment or insurance advisor

In certain circumstances, your consent cannot be withdrawn. For example, you may not withdraw your consent where our collection, use and sharing is permitted or required by law, is required to ensure we have correct and up-to-date information about you, such as your current address, or is necessary to manage our business, including the sharing of information when we assign our rights to others for business transactions.

Your Rights 

In addition to exercising your privacy choices above, you can request to access or correct your personal information, ask questions about our privacy practices, or submit a complaint, using the information under “Contact Us” below. Our Privacy Officer will consider your question, request or complaint, and respond to you as appropriate.

Please note that you may be required to verify your identity before we provide you with access to any of your personal information.

Contact Us 

To submit an access or correction request, exercise your privacy choices, ask a question or submit a complaint, please contact our Privacy Officer using the following information:

Canaccord Genuity Corp.
C/O Privacy Officer
40 Temperance Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5H 0B4
Privacy@cgf.com

Third-Party Websites

On this website Canaccord Genuity may provide links to other third-party websites. You need to be aware that Canaccord Genuity has no control over such third-party websites and therefore we are unable to guarantee that the controller of the respective website will respect your privacy in the same way as Canaccord Genuity. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.

Updates To This Policy

This Privacy Policy was last updated January 31, 2024 and may be updated periodically to reflect changes to our personal information practices. We strongly encourage you to refer to this Privacy Policy regularly for the latest information about our practices.