Losing trust?

AUSTRALIA’S biggest bank, The Commonwealth Bank (CBA), admitted this week that it has lost the financial records of more than 20 million customers in what the country’s Prime Minister called an “extraordinary blunder”.

At over 20 million customers, that’s almost all of the country’s population of 25 million.

The incident happened when magnetic tapes were lost by the bank’s subcontractor Fuji Xerox during the decommissioning of one of CBA’s data centres.

Customers were not notified of this incident where data lost included that of customer names, addresses, account numbers and transaction information.

According to the bank, a decision was made not to alert customers presumably so as not to cause alarm.

Whether this was a good decision or not is relative.

Such news is not new. Neither is it rare. In fact, such an incident has also happened in Malaysia. And not too long ago.

In such instances, who is really to be blamed?

More importantly, how can these occurrences be stopped? Are more measures needed to be put in place?

Customers these days are not only concerned about things like passwords to accounts being compromised.

To quote tech website CNET: “In an era when identity theft is a growing threat and personal information is sold on the dark web as a valuable commodity, a data breach of this size is deeply concerning for customers.” It was referring to the CBA case.

“Criminals can build a detailed profile of a person with information like a name and address and a PIN isn’t needed to do serious damage,” it added.

In essence, customers need to be able to trust companies they give their information to. They need to know that when they pass on their personal data to the firms, it will not be compromised.

This cannot be stressed on enough. What more when the company is a financial institution.