January 2018

Happy New Year! Last month, I encouraged you to come up with some financial goals for 2018. Most of my suggested goals were truly financial in nature (paying down debt, saving for something, cutting back, etc.), but one important topic that we can always stand to make goals around is taking steps to protect ourselves from fraud.

There are many ways you can do that, but today I want to focus on one goal related to fraud prevention that you could easily achieve in just a few minutes: Make sure your contact information is accurate and up-to-date with all of your financial institutions.

Why is this so important for fraud prevention? If your financial institution doesn’t have accurate contact information on file for you, important communication regarding your account could be delayed or could not be delivered at all.

With fraud always on the rise and newer, more sophisticated means of committing fraud always being developed, it is now more important than ever for us to be able to reach you in a timely manner. If your card was involved in a data breach, for example, or we suspected fraud on your card, we would need to be able to reach you right away to ensure you were aware. In either situation, there is the possibility that your card would have to be shut down, and we always want to be able to inform our members ahead of time if such a step is necessary.

It is also important for you to know that Reliant will be updating our Visa debit cards mid-year to enable them
with EMV chip technology. The new cards will offer additional fraud-prevention features, and so we will be reissuing new cards to Reliant debit cardholders to give our members that extra layer of security. New cards sent to inaccurate addresses cannot be forwarded; they will be returned to us. Therefore, if your address is not up-to-date in our files, you may not receive your new card. It will be really important that you activate the new card right away, because the old card will no longer work after a short time.

Being able to reach you in a timely manner is key to keeping your account safe and secure. You can call us at 800-724-9282 or visit any branch today to verify that we have your correct address, email, and phone number
on file.

And with that simple step, you can easily check one goal off your New Year’s list!

I wish you a safe and happy New Year, and as always, thank you for your membership!

Pamela Heald
President & CEO