How to stay safe while using Snowball Effect

Overview

As Snowball Effect operates in the Financial Services sector, we take security seriously and are constantly reworking our systems and processes to ensure the safety of our investors and our own data.

Given the number of cyber incidents we're seeing in the banking/financial space, we've created this article to detail some of the preventative measures we've put into place here at Snowball Effect for investors like yourself.

Two-factor authentication

Two-factor authentication allows investors to include a secondary mechanism to verify their access to their Snowball Effect account. Verification methods include sending a code to your registered email address, registering an application like Google Authenticator to store your one-time passwords securely, or setting up a passkey for your Snowball Effect account. 

You can access your two-factor configuration and set it up through your user dashboard on Snowball Effect.

Signing in using Google

If you are using a Google account, we offer the option to log in using your Google Account details. This allows you to leverage the suite of security features that come with a Google Account without having to maintain a separate password for your Snowball Effect account. In order for you to sign in using Google, you will require a Snowball Effect account to be set up first.

Password best practices

We recommend that you create a password that is unique to Snowball Effect. This prevents scenarios where a compromised account results in all accounts with a similar password being compromised. To combat simple passwords, Snowball Effect has a password recipe requiring investors to have a minimum of:

Investor details collection

Our product team has moved to collecting information through a data collection portal. You may have experienced this when completing your KYC profile after making an investment with us. This ensures sensitive documents are securely handled without having to be sent back and forth via email. Once uploaded to Snowball Effect, these are stored in an encrypted state, adding an additional layer of security. This means they require an additional set of secret credentials before you can view them.

Investment payment details

With the rise of fraudulent deposit details making headlines, we've made a change to ensure that bank account details are only accessible by logging into your Snowball Effect account. This provides two layers of confidence:

• You can validate that the details being provided are sourced directly from a verified Snowball Effect source, including verifying that the website being accessed is official and legitimate.
• You have the option to independently verify details without having to click on any links present in the email.

Verifying communications are sent via Snowball Effect

Should you receive any information you are uncomfortable with, you can use two simple checks to validate the authenticity of the communication. Additional self-service verification methods include:

• Verifying the email address is coming from an @snowballeffect.co.nz domain. With modern-day email clients, scammers impersonating sending emails from @snowballeffect.co.nz will either be classified as spam or rejected altogether.
• Validating that any websites accessed resolve to snowballeffect.co.nz, and be careful to note that it is free of any mis-spellings.

If you need further clarification, you can email us directly at [email protected] or call our team on 0800 SNOWBALL. 

In summary

The product team at Snowball Effect is continually improving processes to ensure that we offer best-in-class security to all our investors. 

As some security features require the investor to set them up, we encourage investors to regularly review and exercise all security features made available to them.