After the big surprise of seeing at work a list with all my personal purchases included in a big set of documents to which I, together with a great number of other colleagues, had access, I went immediately to the bank and I reported the fact.

After some days had passed without seeing any consequence, I went again, this time discussing with some supervising employee, who attempted to convince me that this is some kind of minor mistake and there is no need to do anything about it.

However, I pointed to the precise law paragraphs condemning what they have done and I threatened with legal action. This escalation resulted in me being invited to a bigger branch of the bank, to a discussion with someone in a management position. This time they were extremely ass-kissing, I was shown also the guilty employee, who apologized herself, and eventually I let it go, though there were no clear guarantees that they will change their behavior to prevent such mistakes in the future.

Apparently the origin of the mistake had been a badly formulated database query, which had returned a set of accounts for which the transactions had to be reported to my employer. I had been receiving during the same time interval some money from my employer into my private account, corresponding to salary and travel expenses, and somehow those transactions were matched by the bad database query, grouping my private account with the company accounts. Then the set of account numbers was used to generate reports, without further verification of the account ownership.

This was not a honest mistake.

It was completely reckless behavior, even if the guilt was distributed both on the employee who has not checked whether the information sent to external parties is information to which access is permitted for them and on the employees who did not implement a system that would check automatically for such mistakes.

Moreover, the attempt made by multiple bank employees to hide the incident, instead of taking responsibility for it, has amply demonstrated that only a financial punishment that would have affected them personally would have caused them to act carefully in the future.

Also, the guilty bank employee was not some poor customer service staff, but she appeared to have a senior position, handling the accounts of a very big multinational company, which was my employer at the time.

I have little doubt that trying to hide such incidents is the normal behavior for banks, unlike the poster to which I have replied said, i.e. they take seriously things like banking secrecy only if they are caught.

It was an unlikely occurrence that I happened to also have access to the documents where my personal information was included, so I could discover what the bank has done. In most such cases it is likely that the account owner never becomes aware that the bank has leaked confidential information.