Two more major Irish financial institutions - Quinn-direct insurance and Bank of Ireland - yesterday acknowledged that internal errors had led them to send incorrect personal information to their customers.
This follows the revelation yesterday that AIB bank had inadvertently sent 15,000 notifications to its customers containing the private bank account details of other individuals, affecting a total of 11,000 AIB customers.
In a statement released yesterday, Quinn-direct said it had recently discovered an error in its mailing system which led to 32 of its customers receiving an information pack that contained a page with another customer's policy information. In five of these cases, the packs contained information relating to the valuables on another person's premises.
One caller to RTÉ's Liveline programme yesterday said she had received information relating to other customers, including their name, address, telephone number and a detailed descriptions of valuables such as jewellery, entertainment equipment and computers.
Quinn-direct said it regretted the incident and apologised to the 32 customers affected. "The company is currently contacting the customers affected to apologise for this error and is forwarding the correct policy information to them immediately and asking them to return the incorrect page," it said. "Quinn-direct has also taken the necessary steps to rectify this error."
A spokesman for Bank of Ireland yesterday confirmed that it had sent out of date or incorrect payment advice notices to 600 of its customers earlier this week. The notices, which were mainly duplicates of previous transactions on the customers' own accounts, also included amendments to the amounts in question in some cases. The statements were being used to test new computer software but were inadvertently sent out to customers when the new system went live.
However, the spokesman said there was "no issue" in relation to data privacy as the information in question related to customers' own accounts. "Customers got duplicate confirmations of payments which their businesses would have made," he said.
