Your Privacy.

The opportunities you deserve, the privacy you expect.

Heritage, MHC (hereinafter "Heritage") recognizes the importance of protecting your personal information and respects your privacy. We appreciate the confidence you have placed in us. Confidentiality is a key element to providing quality financial services. Heritage has a number of affiliates offering a wide variety of services. This information covers all of the members of the Heritage corporate family, including Heritage Financial Group, HeritageBank of the South and Heritage Real Estate Holdings Company Inc. Our corporate family continues its commitment to upholding high standards of privacy for your protection and benefit.

Whether you are an existing customer or are considering a financial relationship with us, we want you to know how we collect, use and retain information about you and your financial relationship with us. Under no circumstance do we provide account numbers to other marketing companies for the purpose of independent telemarketing or direct mail marketing of any non-financial products or services of those companies. Our customer privacy program is summarized below. If you have any questions, we encourage you to contact a Heritage representative at 229-878-3307 or 800-227-7989, ext. 2111.

Collection of Customer Information.

We collect, use and retain non-public personal information from a variety of sources for the purpose of administering our business and to provide products, services or other opportunities for our customers. For example, we collect non-public personal information from the following sources:

Information we receive from you on applications or other forms;
Information about your transactions with us, our affiliates, or others; and
Information we receive from consumer reporting agencies.

How Heritage uses this Customer Information.

This non-public personal information is used to evaluate and manage our risks; to protect and administer customer accounts, records, and funds; to comply with applicable laws and regulations; to develop or enhance our portfolio of products and services; and other valid business purposes.

Information we may share about you.

Within Heritage: We maintain strict internal policies against unauthorized disclosure or use of non-public personal information. We restrict access to non-public personal information about you to Heritage employees who have a specific business purpose in utilizing your data. Our employees are trained in the importance of maintaining confidentiality and customer privacy. We maintain physical, electronic and procedural safeguards that comply with federal standards to guard your non-public personal information. As permitted by law, information held by any Heritage subsidiary is available to other members of the Heritage corporate family for authorized purposes. We may disclose the following information to the other members of the Heritage corporate family:

Information we receive from you on applications and other forms, such as your name, address, social security number, assets and income;
Information about your transactions with us, our affiliates or others, such as account activity, balance, payment history, parties to transactions; and Information received from consumer credit reporting agencies, such as your creditworthiness and credit history.

You have the choice to limit the sharing of your information, but please consider that by making customer information available across the Heritage corporate family, we are able to provide better service and offer financial solutions we believe you will find of value. In fact, some products and services are available only if you allow us to share your information. (See "How to elect not to have your information shared.")

Outside Heritage: Heritage does not sell any personal information that you have provided to us, or that we have collected about you from any third party source, to any outside marketers. We are committed to providing you with competitive products and services to meet your financial needs, which necessitates that we share information about you to complete your transactions and to provide you with financial opportunities. In order to do so, we have entered into agreements with other companies that provide either service to us or additional financial products for you to consider. Under these arrangements, we may disclose the information we collect, as described below, to companies that perform services on our behalf or to other financial institutions with which we have joint marketing agreements. To protect your privacy, we only work with companies that have contractually agreed to maintain strong confidentiality protections and limit the use and disclosure of information except as necessary to carry out the joint marketing or service agreements. We do not permit these companies to sell the information we provide them to other third parties. We may disclose the following information to companies that perform marketing services on our behalf or to other financial institutions with which we have joint marketing agreements:

Information we receive from you on applications and other forms, such as your name and address; and
Information about your transactions with us, our affiliates, or others, such as account activity, balance, payment history or parties to transactions.

We do not disclose any non-public personal information about our customers or former customers to anyone except as permitted by law. These disclosures typically include information to process transactions on your behalf, conduct the operations of our bank, and follow your instructions as you authorize, or protect the security of our financial records. Examples of recipients of this information include, but are not limited to, statement-processing companies, companies who print checks for our customers, Federal Regulators and auditing firms retained by Heritage or other members of our corporate family. As with all our business partners, these companies are required to safeguard your non-public personal information and use it only for authorized purposes.

In accordance with standard financial institution industry practices, and as allowed under federal and state law, Heritage routinely provides data about customer loan repayment and other transactions to consumer reporting agencies and other creditors. Certain federal and state statutes may require us to disclose information about you. For example, if you are involved in litigation with a third party, we may be ordered to provide information to a court or other litigant. In these circumstances, only the specific information required by law, subpoena or court order will be disclosed.

If you terminate your relationship with Heritage, we will not share information we have collected about you, except as permitted or required by law.

How to elect NOT to have your information shared.

Unless you tell us not to, Heritage may share non-public personal information about you with companies in our corporate family. If you prefer that we not share this information with companies in our corporate family, you may direct us not to share this information about you that isn't publicly available. This is commonly known as "opting out" of information sharing. There are several ways to "opt out": (a) call us at 229-878-3200 or 800-227-7989, ext. 3200 and request an Opt-Out form, to complete and return; (b) visit any of our offices and complete an Opt-Out form; or (c) write to us at Heritage, MHC, Attention: Customer Information Center, P.O. Box 50728, Albany, Georgia 31703-0728, and provide your full name, social security number, address, daytime phone number and all account numbers. Please be advised that if a joint account customer chooses not to allow disclosure of this information, this decision will apply to the entire joint account.