Seventy-six percent of small business owners say that existing measures to protect consumers should be kept in place due to privacy of their personal information and sales pressure concerns, according to a POLLARA Inc. survey released by Advocis.

The finding suggests that small business owners believe that the privacy of their health and medical history is more important than having greater access to information about life and health insurance services provided by banks.

Currently, the Bank Act prohibits banks from marketing or selling life or health insurance in their branches due to concerns about consumer privacy and tied selling. Recent proposals from the banks would jeopardize these protections. Publicly the banks say they merely want to inform consumers.

“The issue isn’t brochures,” says Gary McLeod, Advocis’ chairman. “The issue is fundamentally about privacy and whether intimate personal information should be traded, shared or used to get more business. What the banks are calling for is more access to personal information to market more of their products.

“Concerns about privacy require that banking and personal information always be kept separate and apart,” adds McLeod. “To allow banking and health and medical information to come together — under any circumstances — is an intolerable threat to consumer privacy.”

The survey says 65% of small business owners are concerned about whether the personal health information in their insurance application would be kept separate from their business banking information, such as a loan application. The insurance application process necessarily involves asking very personal health questions such as whether the applicant has had cancer, suffers from depression, or has been treated for an STD.

“Consumers don’t want their bank to have access to this kind of information, share it, or potentially use it to make decisions about loans or credit applications,” said McLeod.

The results of the Advocis/POLLARA Small Business Survey are no surprise to the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, an association representing 105,000 business-owners across Canada.

“Small businesses are leery of banks expanding their powers, having access to and use of personal information, and the linkage of that information to loans,” says Garth Whyte, executive vice-president of the CFIB. “Small businesses are fearful of tied selling and think that banks have enough power already.”

Without the current protections in place, small businesses and their owners may be vulnerable to aggressive sales pressure from banks that are able to access both their health and financial information, it says. Alarmingly, 18% of small business owners whose businesses have been approved for a bank loan, commercial mortgage, business lease or business line of credit over the past 7 years have felt at least some pressure by their bank to give them more of their business.

“The pressure felt by consumers to give their bank more business will be much stronger if the bank holds the consumer’s personal medical history,” says McLeod, “Existing consumer protections make sense. They strike the right balance between protecting the consumer’s privacy while allowing the banks to sell insurance through subsidiaries. We think that’s fair.”

However, the Canadian Bankers Association says CFIB and Advocis are completely ignoring the facts and using fear-mongering against a proposal that would improve consumer access to insurance product information.

“Both of these practices are prohibited and they do not happen,” said Raymond Protti, president and CEO of the CBA. “To the detriment of Canadian consumers, the CFIB and Advocis are opposed to the proposed changes for self-interested reasons. Without the facts on their side, they are spreading unnecessary fear and false accusations about what would happen if the banking industry’s proposed changes were adopted – changes that research shows Canadians support.”

He notes that ;aws and other measures prevent medical and health information from being shared with third parties. The federal personal information privacy legislation is among the best in the world and there is a bank insurance code of conduct in place that prohibits the sharing of health and medical information or using such information to assess loans or marketing any other product. Further, this code is monitored by the federal government regulator, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada (FCAC).

In addition, banks have long had policies to prohibit coercive tied selling and Parliament passed a coercive tied selling prohibition in the Bank Act in 2001. The FCAC monitors and enforces banks’ compliance with the legislation. These safeguards are so strict that even the Insurance Brokers Association of Canada said, in their submission to the federal government on the Bank Act review, that the prohibitions address the matter “to their complete satisfaction.”

@page_break@In response to the CBA, McLeod says: “We’re not accusing the banks of anything. We are saying that under no circumstances should banking and health and medical information come together, that includes within a banking group. This would be an intolerable threat to consumer privacy. And that’s why these protections were put in the Bank Act in the first place and that’s why they should remain.

“We’re raising a legitimate concern about the appropriateness of collecting, sharing and trading personal information in order to get more business. When it comes to information like one’s personal health and medical history, we believe that privacy must come first. On this important issue, we must always err on the side caution and defend the consumer’s interest.

“The CBA is throwing stones from a glass house when it accuses others of acting out of self interest. The banking industry is proposing its changes in order to sell more of its products … period.”