By Adedapo Adesanya
Nigerian lender, Fidelity Bank, has denied the claims of data breach and has promised to dispute the penalty of N555.8 million slammed on it by the Nigerian Data Protection Commission (NDPC), a penalty that represents 0.1 per cent of its gross revenue for 2023.
On Wednesday, Business Post reported that the National Commissioner for NDPC, Mr Vincent Olatunji, announced the fine during a Validation Workshop on the Nigeria Data Protection Act General Application and Implementation Directive in Abuja.
According to him, Fidelity Bank was found to have breached the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) of 2019 and the Nigeria Data Protection (NDP) Act of 2023.
“Since we began enforcing data protection regulations, this is the most significant penalty we’ve issued,” Mr Olatunji stated.
“Fidelity Bank’s violations were serious, and despite working with them since April 2023 to address these issues, their arrogance ultimately led us to impose the full penalty,” he added.
He also said the NDPC had given Fidelity Bank 14 days to pay the fine upon receiving the notice.
In response, the lender claims an internal investigation showed no evidence of a data breach and that the account opening process was not completed due to missing documentation.
“On May 2nd 2023, we responded to the NDPC that the bank did not violate any law because there was no data breach and that the account opening process was not completed,” the bank said in a statement.
“On our part, we carried out due diligence by immediately blocking the account and subsequently closing the account when we did not receive the outstanding documents.”
Fidelity Bank said the regulator had initially demanded a remedial fee of N250 million on December 5, 2023, but the bank had challenged this decision, insisting that they had not violated any laws.
It also claimed that despite ongoing negotiations, the NDPC increased the fine to N555.8 million on August 20, the bank claimed.
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