My name is Farheen Shahzadi and I am a US citizen. On November 12th 2020, I had applied to open a Roshan Digital Account for non-resident Pakistanis at Meezan Bank Limited through an online portal. As required by Bank, all the personal details including my name, CNIC, digital picture, residential address, contact numbers and a passport copy were provided at the given portal,  trusting the Bank's privacy policy and consumer data protection guidelines.

On November 13th 2020 , an unknown mobile number 0335-7545384 (which was subsequently turned out to be of Mr. Syed Muhammad Khurram's, AM at Meezan Bank) started calling me late at night. I obviously tried to ignore but the person kept on giving missed calls, which ended up on the video calls and several text messages (screenshots of which are attached for your ready reference). After getting annoyed with such an absurd attitude, I started searching for the unknown harasser so that a formal legal action can be taken against him. It was unfortunate when the guy turned out to be the Assistant Manager at Meezan Bank Limited as per the information provided on LinkedIn profile. [As soon as the matter was taken up before the concerned authorities and upon my intimation to take legal action, the guy and his relatives called me and admitted their guilt which has provided further affirmation/confirmation that he is an employee of the Meezan Bank and the incident was not just a matter of harassment and mental agony but the violation of privacy & customer data protection guidelines by the Bank]. How could this be possible for an employee to reach out to the personal information of a customer and its blatant use thereafter? The Bank did not even bother to hire a trained staff for the sensitive positions, dealing with the customer's direct information. I am afraid as if the employee can access my personal number and start abusing the SBP guidelines/policies so expressly, he could have misused my account details, transactions, and identity too.

I have suffered through a huge mental stress and completely lost all the trust in Banking channels to route my earnings to Pakistan as the regulator seems to have a zero visibility of the abuse of policies and guidelines related to consumer data protection and privacy. In the current scenario, my privacy and personal information has expressly been compromised by the Bank, its employees and the management who had failed to ensure strict adherence to the KYC guidelines and Bank's HR as well as operational manual. It is not only the violation of the privacy land cyber laws of Pakistan but also tantamount to a sheer disregard to the policies and misuse of the KYC guidelines.

In this regard, the SBP being regulator of the Bank, is requested to take strict regulatory action against the Bank and Mr. Syed Muhammad Khurram. It is also requested to take  disciplinary action against said employee and impose an excessive penalty on the Bank for abusing & compromising the customer's personal information/ data provided just for the sake of opening up of account, that too under an implied contract/agreement by the Bank that the same shall be protected from any misuse.