CLYDE & CO UPDATER - BANK OF TANZANIA: CIRCULAR ON THE LOCATION OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DATA CENTRES

In this month's legal briefing, we cover the requirement for banks and financial institutions to locate their primary or secondary data centres in Tanzania. This requirement is detailed in the Bank of Tanzania (the BoT) circular number FA.56/293/01/54 (the Circular) issued on 23 August 2019.

In summary the Circular requires that all banks and financial institutions in Tanzania do the following:

1. put in place a primary or secondary data centre
2. within seven working days from the date of issuance of the circular re-confirm the location of the data centres, compliance status and prepare for the centres to be tested
3. within 3 months from the date of issuance of this circular establish a primary data centre

Non-compliance with 1. and 2. above attracts a penalty of TZS 5 billion and TZS 500 million for every month of the recurring offence.

The circular is to be read together with circular number FA.56/293/043/VOL.III/28 issued on 3 March 2014, FB.44/475/01/35 issued on 29 February 2016 and FA.56/235/20/29 issued on 10 July 2019. Copies of these circulars can be found on the Bank of Tanzania website.

Key Definitions

A data centre is a data storage facility where banks and financial institutions store all their operational data including client data and information on account transactions / deposits etc. A primary data centre is the main storage facility while a secondary data centre is a data recovery site capable of sustaining operations in case the primary data centre is inaccessible.

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