The National Data Protection Commission (NDPC) has fined Fidelity Bank N555.8m for violating customers’ data privacy.
National commissioner of NPDC Vincent Olatunji announced the fine on Wednesday at the validation workshop on the Nigeria Data Protection Act General Application and Implementation Directive in Abuja.
The bank, whose CEO is Nneka Onyeali-Ikpe, was found to have breached the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) of 2019 and the Nigeria Data Protection (NDP) Act of 2023.
The fine amounts to 0.1 percent of the bank’s annual gross revenue for 2023.
Olatunji said the fine, which is the highest ever issued by the commission, was aggravated by the bank’s arrogance and poor cooperation during its investigation.
He said, “Data protection compliance is important and 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 on the remuneration fee.
“Since we started, the major penalty we issued was yesterday (Tuesday) on Fidelity Bank. 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 is to pay within 14 days of receiving the notice.
