Recent Development
“The Regulation for Disclosure of Confidential Information” (the “Regulation“) was published in the Official Gazette No. 31501 dated June 4, 2021. The effective date of the Regulation was previously set as January 1, 2022. However, pursuant to the “Regulation Amending the Regulation for Disclosure of Confidential Information”, which was published in the Official Gazette No. 31699 dated December 24, 2021, the effective date of the Regulation is now changed to July 1, 2022.
The Regulation stipulates Turkish banks’ confidentiality obligations and the exceptions thereto, and sets forth the principles of the sharing and disclosure of confidential information deemed secret under the Banking Law No. 5411. You can read more about this in our Legal Alert dated June 7, 2021.
Conclusion
The compliance with the Regulation requires Turkish banks to classify the bank secrets, client secrets and third party information they are processing and to assess whether they are compliant with the Regulation for each type of client information they disclose to third parties, which is a very time-consuming and exhaustive study considering that various obligations are provided depending on the type of data and to whom and on what basis the data is shared. By postponing the effectiveness of the Regulation, the BRSA provided a great deal of convenience to the banks in terms of their compliance with the Regulation.
