- Safiu Kehinde
Federal Government has slammed Fidelity Bank with N555.8 million over alleged data breaches.
This was made known by the Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) at the Nigeria Data Protection (NDP) Act General Application and Implementation Directive (GAID) validation workshop in Abuja yesterday.
As disclosed by the National Commissioner of NDPC, Dr Vincent Olatunji, Fidelity Bank defaulted the NDP Act which was signed into law by President Bola Tinubu last year in an effort to enforce compliance of data protection on organizations by way of fines and other means.
Following the conclusion of Investigation, which began in April last year, on Fidelity Bank, the financial institution was found to have defaulted the Act in an alleged Data Breaching.
Fidelity Bank appeared to be the first institution to be sanctioned in accordance to the Act’s provision as revealed by Olatunji.
“The penalty is huge if you don’t comply; penalties can range from N10million to even up to two per cent of the organisation’s annual gross income for the previous year.
“Most of the breaches we have treated, we look at the level of the breach, the impact, the number of data subjects affected and the level of cooperation that is involved.
“Since we started, the only time we issued a major penalty was yesterday on Fidelity Bank; a fine of N555,800,000 after we observed some breaches.
“We have been working with them since April 2023 on the investigation and, by the time we finalised, we decided to issue a full penalty on them, which is about 0.1 per cent of the gross earnings for 2023.” Olatunji explained.
Olatunji stressed further that the Commission was engaging with stakeholders across board and collating their input which would form the final guide document.
He recalled how a similar workshop was held in Lagos on June 19 for about 70 per cent of data protection organisations in the private sector.
“We want to ensure everyone is involved in what we are doing and, by the time the document is out, we will all see that we have been able to make our own input; it is just an extension of the law.
“We will look at the relevance of the inputs and use them to develop a standard document that can be of global standard.” He added.