The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | April 8th

By Gaia Lamperti

April 08, 2022

Bank Of Ireland
Big Data
Cybersecurity

The Weekly Wrap is published every Friday and recaps the week’s main stories and deals, as well as upcoming events and announcements. For Prime subscribers only.

The Big Story

Bank of Ireland has been fined €463,000 by the Data Protection Commission (DPC) for a series of data breaches affecting customer personal information.

The Commission investigated 22 personal data breach notifications made by the bank between November 2018 and June 2019, affecting more than 50,000 customers. Some unauthorised disclosures of personal data and accidental alterations of the centralised system that collects and stores information about loans led to the breach.

“Bank of Ireland fully acknowledges, and sincerely apologises for, these breaches. The Bank takes its regulatory and compliance obligations very seriously and regrets that it has fallen short in this way,” said the bank in a statement.

The bank has been fined not only for the breaches but for delays in communicating with the affected customers. The DPC has also ordered corrective action. This is not the first fine Bank of Ireland has faced in recent times, just last December, it was hit with a €24.5 million fine over IT deficiencies that took over a decade to fix.

Deals of the week

Fidel API raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures
Moneybox secures £35 million in Series D funding as AUA nears £3bn
EnKash raises $20 million in Series B round led by Ascent Capital
Nous Systems launches a seven-figure seed round raise based on a €30 million valuation
Unifimoney secures $10 million seed investment for its digital wealth management platform
Uplinq raises $3.5 million in pre-seed funding round
ImaliPay raises $3 million seed to deepen its financial services infrastructure across Africa

Be on the lookout for

Another bank approaching the metaverse. HSBC is launching a metaverse investment fund to give high-net-worth clients a chance to step into the emerging digital economy. The bank’s Metaverse Discretionary Strategy portfolio will focus on five key segments in the virtual ecosystem: infrastructure, computing, virtualisation, experience and discovery, and interface. The move comes shortly after HSBC acquired its own plot of land in the metaverse . A recent report by Citi estimates that the Metaverse economy could be worth up to $13 trillion by 2030.

April 08, 2022