Recruitment agency Hays disclosed day rates of 3,000 RBS contractors to 800 people at the bank earlier this week which showed some contractors were earning up to £2,000 per day. The email was intended to remind managers to update timesheets in time for the bank holiday and included the attachment with the confidential information.

The massive mistake is resulting in huge repercussions for RBS as the union, Unite, is pressing for more information on contractor rates expressing “serious concerns” over the revelations. RBS, owned by the British taxpayer has made up to 1,000 IT staff redundancies in the last years and this email will likely intensify the divisions between temporary and permanent staff.

This was all caused by a Hays employee inadvertently emailing this information. We’ve all at one time or another sent an email to the wrong person, but when confidential information like this is sent, the consequences are dramatic.

While I am certainly not offering my opinion on the contractor rates, I will say, yet again this is another example of a non-malicious content breach that could have been prevented. Checks can be in place that scans for this type of confidential and sensitive information so that it is not able to be sent to a mass group or any irrelevant person.

We are entering a new era of business partnerships; content partnership agreements are the future. Gone are the days when businesses, like RBS, only have a content governance policy for their business. Now partners, like Hays, will need to have strict policies and producers in place for content and it will need to be part of the partnership agreement. There is too much at risk for the business from customer retention, brand damage and financial losses. For RBS they now face the union, internal unrest and customer dissatisfaction, all because a confidential bit of content was unintentionally emailed.