Fidelity Bank was fined N555.8 million by the National Data Protection Commission for violations involving breaches of its clients’ data.
This was disclosed on Wednesday in Abuja during the Validation Workshop on the Nigeria Data Protection Act General Application and Implementation Directive by the commission’s National Commissioner, Vincent Olatunji.
According to him, the tier one bank was penalised 0.1% of the bank’s gross annual revenue in 2023 for violating the NDP Act, 2023, and the NDPR, 2019 regarding data breaches.
The CEO claimed that the bank’s haughtiness and lack of cooperation throughout the commission’s investigation contributed to the sentence, which is the largest penalty ever imposed by the body.
Olatunji declared, “We have made it clear that non-compliance will result in consequences. Data protection compliance is important.” Penalties for the preceding year can be as high as 2% of total earnings or as little as N10 million.However, our strategy has been raising awareness and informing people of what we should be doing. For the most part, we try to look at the extent of the breach, its impact, the number of data subjects impacted, and the organization’s level of cooperation with regard to the reimbursement price.
“Today (Tuesday) was the biggest fine we’ve levied since we started on Faithful Bank. We fined them N555.8 million for breaking both the NDPR of 2019 and the NDP Act of 2023, and they are required to pay. Since April 2023, we have been collaborating with them to investigate the significant breaches that we have noticed. However, by the time we arrived to a conclusion regarding our results, they had become haughty, so we chose to penalise them fully, which amounted to 0.1% of their 2023 profits. He said, “This must be paid within 14 days of receiving this notice.”