Executive Summary

Banking institutions, as with many other entities, are increasingly handling personal data owing to an increased use of different technologies to offer banking services. Increased handling of such personal data coupled with new statutory requirements relating to data protection have placed renewed emphasis on the efforts used by banks to create and communicate policies for handling data subjects’ information. This report analyses the publicly available data policies of commercial banks in Kenya, providing an overview of the approaches taken by the studied banks with respect to data protection for existing and prospective customers.

This report compares the banks’ data policy provisions against a data protection standard developed using the provisions of existing national and international data protection regimes, including the Kenya Data Protection Act 2019 (DPA) and the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This standard comprises three broad indicators: data collection, data sharing, and the rights of data subjects. Compliance with these indicators is measured using tabulated analyses showing the individual and aggregated performance of the banks.

The report’s conclusions are derived from research conducted in Kenya in 2019 and 2020. A total of 32 policies were identified and analysed, all of which were in existence prior to the enactment of the Kenya DPA. This report is therefore a baseline study of the policies; the report anticipates that there will be changes in banking policies as the DPA is put into practice. The findings in this report will be useful for comparative purposes as the DPA is implemented and enforced.

Key Findings

On average, the banks were found to be more likely to have unclear or incomplete policy provisions in all categories. Provisions relating to data collection were the most compliant while provisions relating to rights of data subjects had the lowest compliance score.

There is a notable variance in the performance of banks with regard to rights of data subjects. A large number of banks lacked any policy provisions in this category while a similarly large number of banks were clustered at the higher scores. This disparity suggests that the banks took two general approaches, i.e., to exclude policy provisions relating to data subjects’ rights altogether, or to incorporate such provisions clearly and completely.

Overall, provisions relating to the purpose of processing data were the most compliant among all provisions in all categories. Provisions relating to the rights of data subjects to object to the outcome of an automated decision were the least compliant. Clarity or completeness of provisions was a problem for a large number of the policies, and the overall readability of the policies may present challenges to banking customers that are likely to have a wide range of formal education.

Although the report highlights that the banking sector falls short of what we consider internationally-recognized norms in data protection, the data also show that data protection policies are widely present in the sector, and can be modified to become compliant.