Polish Antitrust Office Alleges Santander, BNP Paribas, 3 Others Broke Rules

Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK), its antimonopoly office, announced Monday (July 18) that it has filed charges against five banks that it says acted against consumers’ interests.

This comes after a yearlong investigation, per Reuters. The banks charged with “infringing the collective interests of consumers” were Bank Millennium, BNP Paribas Bank Polska, Credit Agricole Bank Polska, mBank and Santander Bank Polska, the watchdog said.

Moving forward, the watchdog will look into charges in cooperation with the institutions. If the charges stick, the banks might face fines of up to 10% of their annual turnover.

The banks did not respond to a request for comment from PYMNTS at press time.

Last December, PYMNTS wrote that the watchdog had also launched an investigation into Apple’s changing privacy and personal data rules. At the time, the UOKiK said the change had to do with the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which makes it so app developers have to get permission from users to track their activity for ad targeting.

Read more: Poland Anticompetition Watchdog Investigates Apple’s Privacy Settings Changes

According to the watchdog, while the policy changes were supposed to cut down on how apps could gather personal information on users to send personalized ads, there’s also no guarantee that the data isn’t being collected anymore.

UOKiK also questioned whether the rules were designed to promote the company’s Apple Search Ads service.

“The actions of digital giants are a challenge for antitrust authorities all around the world,” UOKiK President Tomasz Chróstny said in a statement last December. “During the course of our investigation, we want to examine whether Apple’s actions may be aimed at eliminating competitors in the market for personalized advertising services, the objective being to better sell their own service. We will investigate whether this is a case of exclusionary abuse of market power.”

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