NDPC fines Nigerian bank N555.8m for breaching customers’ data

The National Data Protection Commission (NDPC) has fined Fidelity Bank Plc a total of N555.8m for breaching its customers’ data.

The commission’s National Commissioner, Vincent Olatunji, said this at the Validation Workshop on the Nigeria Data Protection Act General Application and Implementation Directive on Wednesday in Abuja.

Olatunji said the Commission has been investigating the Bank since April 2023, adding that it decided to issue a full penalty due to its arrogance.According to Olatunji, the fine which was issued on Tuesday must be paid within the next 14 days.

The CEO also said the fine, which represents the highest fine to be issued by the commission, was aggravated by the bank’s arrogance and poor cooperation during its investigation. “Since we started, the major penalty we issued was yesterday (Tuesday) on fidelity bank.

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For the violation of the NDP Act, 2023, and the NDPR, 2019, we issued a fine of N555.8m and they have to pay.“ We have observed serious breaches and we have been working with them, investigating the issue since April 2023.

But by the time we finalised our findings, they became arrogant and we decided to issue a full penalty on them which is about 0.1 per cent of their earnings for 2023.

The bank, he noted, violated the NDP Act, 2023, and the NDPR, 2019 on data breach and was fined the amount being 0.1 per cent of the Bank’s annual gross revenue in 2023.

Olatunji said, “We have stated that non-compliance will be punished. We have penalties that range from N10m or up to two per cent of gross earnings for the previous year.“ But our approach has been creating awareness and letting people know what we are supposed to be doing and most of the breaches we try to look at the level of breach, impact, and the number of data subjects affected and the level of cooperation by the organisation involved in the remuneration.