Italian competition authority orders Intesa Sanpaolo to stop consentless customer migration
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Italian competition authority, the Autorità Garante Della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), recently ordered Intesa Sanpaolo to halt customer migrations to its new app-only unit.
The Italian lender recently launched an app-only, cloud-based Isybank, which went live this summer. The new app came as part of the bank’s major digital transformation program.
However, Intesa Sanpaolo then started migrating its 2.4 million customers to the new app-only offshoot without asking for consent, which did not sit right with the users or the Italian watchdog.
AGCM hit with 2,000 complaints
The company migrated around 300,000 customers to the new unit in October alone. However, it did not ask for their permission, it simply sent them a message notifying them of what was going on, with the option to opt out of the migration.
The move caused a lot of outrage among the customers, who started contacting AGCM with complaints about the situation. According to the regulator, it has received around 2,000 complaints about the switch since the bank started the process.
Furthermore, AGCM stated that the lender sent the messages to its customers in the archive section of the app with no push notifications or pop-ups. As a result, the users were not even “properly” notified of the switch or their capability to opt out, and only those who inspected the Intesa Sanpaolo App in detail had a chance of running into the notification.
As a result, many of the bank’s customers said that they were quite unhappy about the move, and especially about the fact that the messages were sent in August, during the holidays. Once the users had returned from their summer vacations, they were met with new accounts that had “different economic conditions.”
Users also complained about losing multiple services after their accounts were switched to the new app. One example is the loss of the ability to create virtual cards, which they use for making online purchases.
Intesa Sanpaolo to halt the transfers and ask for consent
In light of the situation, the regulator informed Intesa that it must immediately halt the process and not perform the switch to Isybank for the rest of its 2.4 million users without their express consent. It claimed that “The transfer was planned in a manner that did not comply with the provisions of the Consumer Code.”
That way, the regulator aims to protect the clients’ rights to keep their current accounts, with the same conditions and benefits they got to enjoy until now. Especially since “These essential changes to previously concluded contracts were unilaterally imposed without customers’ prior consent to the transfer having been sought.”
