OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU
We are committed to your financial well-being, and protecting
the privacy and security of the information you share with us is
included in that commitment. You trust us with your personal and
financial information, and we’ll honor that trust by handling your
information carefully and sensibly. This notice will help you
understand how we safeguard and use information.
SECURITY STANDARDS
WestEnd Advisors continually updates and improves our security
standards and procedures to help us protect against anyone gaining
access to your confidential information, including through the
Internet. Extraneous copies of documents, notes and working papers,
and other material that may contain confidential information about
you are carefully and securely destroyed to help protect your
privacy. We’re continually looking for new technology to use to
further enhance the security of this information. Only those
individuals who need to do so as a part of their job
responsibilities are authorized to have access to your information.
We regularly train our employees on privacy and information
security, and on their obligations to protect your information.
THE INFORMATION WE USE TO BETTER SERVE YOU
When you hire WestEnd Advisors to manage investment portfolios, we
may ask for information that can include where you work, your income
and other investments, your financial goals, and other similar
information. We use this information to help us evaluate your
current income needs, the long-term growth of investment assets that
you may need, and your comfort with a given level of market risk,
all of which is critical in helping us manage investment portfolios
to help you achieve your financial goals.
THE INFORMATION WE SHARE
WestEnd Advisors may at times be required to share information about
you with federal and state regulatory or legal authorities. Only the
appropriate information which we are obligated by state and federal
laws and regulations to release will be made available to
authorities. We do not sell customer lists or individual client
information. Nor does WestEnd Advisors disclose client names and
information to nonaffiliated parties except where we are required to
make that information available to legal and regulatory authorities.
This includes nonaffiliated parties such as investment consulting
firms who may request information on clients as a means of
evaluating our business on behalf of their consulting clients. No
personal information, including that regarding your investment
portfolio or the terms of your management agreement with WestEnd
Advisors will be disclosed, except with your express permission.
Many financial institutions outsource some of their processing and
clerical work to specialists in order to improve their efficiency.
WestEnd Advisors anticipates that it too will outsource some of this
work performed in your behalf, including for example, the
independent reconciliation and verification of clients’ assets and
portfolio accounting information. We will be highly selective in
choosing those companies, and we will restrict the information we
provide them to only what they need to do their job. We will require
them to comply with strict standards of security and
confidentiality. They will not be permitted to release, to use, or
to transfer any client information to any other party for their own
purposes. We will at times select other companies, at our
discretion, to provide products and services that we or affiliated
companies also provide– such as securities brokerage services. Only
the information about you and your portfolios managed by WestEnd
Advisors that is be required by legal and regulatory authorities, if
any, will be released to those firms. In all cases we will require
those firms to adhere to strict standards of security and
confidentiality. They will not be permitted to release, to use, or
to transfer any of your information to any other party for their own
purposes. In all cases we recognize the great responsibility we have
on behalf of our clients to maintain the security and the
confidentiality of your personal information.
OFFERING YOU CHOICES
WestEnd Advisors offers a variety of financial products and services
you can use to meet your financial goals, and we want to let you
know about them when they could be of interest to you. We recognize,
however, that you might have preferences about how we contact you to
let you know about them. You may also have questions about how we
will handle specific circumstances regarding your personal
information, or would like to tell us how you prefer we handle the
security and availability of your personal information. To discus
these or any other questions, express your preferences, or give us
feedback, call us toll-free at 1(888) 500-7501 anytime between 8:30
a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time, contact us at
mail:info:westendadvisors.com, or visit us at
www.westendadvisors.com
WestEnd Advisors
Two Morrocroft Centre
4064 Colony Road, Suite 130
Charlotte, North Carolina 28211
(704) 554-7759 (facsimile)
Revised January 1, 2006