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Supporting seniors’ banking needs, and those who love and care for them, is fundamental to building stronger communities. This is why Alterna offers easy ways to manage your money and ensures equitable access to all our members no matter how they choose to bank with us.

Alterna is committed to supporting seniors with their banking needs. We at Alterna have in place all the requirements needed to meet the Code of Conduct for the Delivery of Banking Services to Seniors (“the Code”), which guides Canadian banks in their delivery of banking products and services to Canada’s seniors.

Alterna regularly reviews and updates the policies, procedures and training regarding the Seniors Code. These are designed to help employees have a better understanding of how they can serve and communicate with senior customers, how to protect them from financial abuse and other fraudulent activities, and provide details on how to escalate any concerns in this regard.

Our Seniors Champion leads the implementation and the compliance with the Code; builds awareness with Alterna employees of matters affecting seniors; and engages with seniors, organizations representing seniors and subject matter experts.

Our public website and our internal information resources are available to increase visibility and education around banking for seniors. These include:

• The Senior Support Centre is an online resource page which provides wide-ranging resources and support for seniors and their support persons. The resources include self-serve banking, banking package discounts, online fraud protection, financial planning, information on powers of attorney and joint accounts, accessibility options and helpful forms. We regularly update our website with new relevant information such as fraudulent activities and scams targeting seniors.
• Internal resources for employees to create greater awareness about the tools, training, policies and procedures available to help them assist and protect seniors.
• Annual mandatory training on the Seniors Code for all employees covering topics such as powers of attorney, joint deposit accounts, supporting seniors with diminished capacity, financial abuse, fraud, scams, financial harm identification, escalation processes, and the available resources for senior customers. This year’s annual training was completed by all staff. The training was reviewed and updated by subject matter experts and Alterna’s Seniors Champion.  
• The promotion of continuous learning by actively sharing examples of real-life scenarios and solutions and using these as coaching opportunities throughout the year.

In 2022,  additional seniors’ fraud prevention webinars were attended online by numerous employees in order to further strengthen the awareness and ultimately the prevention of potential fraud  on our senior customers.

Additionally, in 2022, when Alterna Bank published its new online banking platform, Alterna reached out to senior customers to understand their needs and took seniors feedback into consideration when building its new online banking platform. After the launch of the platform, Alterna also communicated with our senior customers individually to help them with various questions they had about using the new online banking platform. 

Alterna Bank is a digital bank. Customers can access branch services through select branches of Alterna Savings. A decision by Alterna on whether to close a branch follows the Alterna Savings branch closure process.

Alterna Savings looks at market demographics when proceeding with branch closures to determine if additional steps need to be taken to assist seniors. These steps may include:

• Providing the link to the seniors’ section of our website when issuing branch closure notices.
• Advising seniors of available alternatives so that they can continue to bank after the branch has closed.

To ensure that we continue to meet the requirements of the Seniors Code we have integrated it into our regulatory Seniors Code compliance management framework.