1. Information we may collect about you

We may receive personal information about you by any of the following methods:

• by filling in, uploading or sending in forms to us;
• contacting us via our website, social media, webchat, phone, email, post or otherwise,
• through your family members, employer or representative
• attending our events;
• contacting us to manage your product or service;
• contacting us through one of our partner websites;
• by third parties such as other insurance market participants, credit reference agencies, solicitors, witnesses, experts, employers, organisations whom we insure or reinsure or a third party claimant
• sending in, or applying for job roles with us
• having information that is available from publicly available sources including social media websites; or
• contacting us for any other reason.

We may collect and process the following personal information about you:

• information including your name, address, contact details;
• for insurance products, this includes details relating to a proposal or a claim (which depending on the nature of the claim may include credit history/score, medical reports and reports of criminal convictions or crime) or provided to us in relation to the administration of an insurance policy that we insure or re-insure;
• for advisory services, this includes details relating to your instructions for us to provide advisory services, the administration and management of those services and of any claim or complaint
• for recruitment purposes, this includes information you or your recruitment agency supply in relation to your candidacy (e.g. your CV, application form) pre-offer, and references and background checks (administered by a third party) post-offer;
• if you contact us, we may keep a record of that correspondence, voicemail or details of any conversation we may have with you;
• details of your visits to our website and information collected through cookies and other tracking technologies including, but not limited to, your IP address and domain name, your browser version and operating system, traffic data, location data, web logs and other communication data, and the resources that you access; (on most occasions, our websites anonymise IP addresses)
• names, dates of birth, national insurance numbers, pensions value and scheme membership details to administer pension benefits;
• photo and video footage; and
• details of transactions you carry out through our website, including the quotations obtained for insurance and advisory services and the insurance policies and advisory services; and information that is available from publicly available sources including social media websites.

We may collect and processes the following special categories of personal information about you:

• health and medical data, such as information on disability or dietary requirements;
• criminal records or fraudulent activities data, in the event that Markel International has conducted or received the results of criminal records background checks in relation to you, this may be provided to us by you or third parties (such as law enforcement, anti-fraud agencies or other insurers);
• race or ethnicity data such as information contained in your passport or other citizenship and right to work documentation, and information which you have voluntarily provided to us; and
• sexual orientation data where this has been provided voluntarily to us.

2. Why we collect information about you

We may process personal information for certain legitimate or lawful purposes in some or all of the following ways:

• to correspond with clients, beneficiaries and claimants in order to facilitate the insurance policies or advisory services;
• to manage relationships with third parties, e.g., insurance brokers, service providers and business partners;
• to maintain our accounts and records;
• to defend or make claims;
• for recruitment purposes
• for the performance of a contract with you or to take steps to enter into a contract;
• to comply with a legal obligation;
• to comply with foreign law, law enforcement, court and regulatory bodies’ requirements;
• to identify and prevent fraud;
• to modify, personalise or otherwise improve our services/ communications;
• to protect your vital interest or the interest of another individual;
• to gather market intelligence, communicate with and tailor offers to individuals;
• to support the communication and management of Markel International’s run events;
• for training and quality purposes;
• to comply with pension requirements and benefits; 
• to enhance the security of our network and information systems; and
• for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of an official authority.

3. How we may use your personal information

We may use your personal information in the following ways:

• to make decisions on whether to provide insurance or advisory services;
• to manage your insurance policy or advisory services including underwriting and claims handling
• to monitor calls and transactions to ensure service quality, compliance with procedures, to combat fraud and ensure compliance with UK/EU and international sanctions;
• to identify you and to carry out any identity checks as may be required by applicable law and best practice at any given time;
• to recover any payments due to us and where necessary to enforce such recovery through the engagement of debt collection agencies or taking other legal action;
• to analyse it in order to understand the service we provide and in order to improve our business;
• to manage our infrastructure, business operations and comply with internal policies and procedures;
• to demonstrate that our services are provided in compliance with legal, regulatory and professional obligations;
• to notify you about changes to our service;
• for marketing services to you by post, email, SMS, telephone and fax;
• to decide whether to enter into a contract of employment with you;
• to assess your skills, qualifications and suitability for a role, in relation to recruitment specifically;
• to carry out background and reference checks, in relation to recruitment specifically;
• to communicate with you about the recruitment process, in relation to recruitment specifically;
• to manage your pension benefits and adhere to pension requirements;
• to keep records related to our hiring processes in relation to recruitment specifically; and
• for promotional purposes we may publish photography, recordings and other content including advertisement campaigns on our website and related social media sites
• to pay you for the services that have been provided

We will never process your data where these interests are overridden by your interests.

4. Consent

On occasions, your consent to our processing of your personal information or special categories of personal information for certain purposes may be required to comply with applicable data protection laws; and where this is the case, we will ask you for your consent in accordance with those laws.
Where you have given us your consent, you may withdraw that consent at any time. However, where you withdraw your consent in relation to a processing activity, there may be an impact upon our ability to provide you advisory services, insurance cover or pay claims under the cover or proceed with the Markel recruitment process. 

5. Sharing your personal information

Markel International may make personal information available to:

Our group companies

We have group companies throughout the world, both inside and outside Europe (for example, in the USA). We may share your personal data with our group companies, but only for the purposes set out in this privacy policy and we remain responsible for the management and security of personal information. Access to personal information within Markel International, and our group companies, is restricted to those individuals who have a need to access the information for our business.

Other third parties

We may also permit selected third parties and agents including suppliers, service providers, pension providers, reinsurers and financial organisations access to your personal information for the purposes set out in section 2.

All such exchanges will be made in accordance with applicable laws. If false or inaccurate information is provided and/or fraud is identified or suspected, details may be passed to fraud prevention and anti-money laundering agencies, law enforcement agencies or other insurers and may be recorded by us or by them.

We and other organisations may also access and use this information to prevent fraud and other crime, for example when deciding whether to make a payment to you under an insurance or reinsurance policy. We, and other organisations that may access and use information recorded by fraud prevention agencies, may do so from other countries including outside the EEA and UK.

Governmental authorities and third parties involved in court actions

We may disclose your personal information to third parties, the courts and/or regulators or law enforcement agencies in connection with enquiries, proceedings or investigations by such parties anywhere in the world or in order to enable Markel International to comply with its regulatory requirements or dialogue with its regulators as applicable.

6. Marketing

Markel International and associated companies will only use your personal data to manage your products or services and to communicate with you about information that may be of interest. However, sometimes we would like to contact you with details of other products or services it provides.

If you have been referred to us through one of our partner’s websites, we will only use your personal information to contact you about our products or services, or those of our partners which may be of interest to you, if our partner has provided us with your consent, indicating that you are happy for us to contact you.

You can object to these messages from us at any time, using one of the methods set out below:

Email: There will always be an unsubscribe link on any marketing email you receive from us. Some of our brands, where relevant, provide a level of granularity to the types of emails you can unsubscribe from.

Post: We will inform you in any postal communication how you can stop receiving direct mail in future.

Telephone: If you receive a marketing call from us, please let the call operator know if you do not want to receive calls again.

Furthermore you can contact us via email at dataprotectionofficer@markel.com, with the subject header "Stop Marketing". Please include your personal details (Name, Company name, address, email and telephone number) so we can make sure that we do not contact you again. Your details will be placed onto a suppression list to ensure that we continue to comply with your objection. Please note that this process will only stop marketing to the individual named in the email and not your company or organisation as a whole.

If you wish to speak to us directly about marketing communications you are receiving, please use one of the contact details found in section 10.

7. Transmission, storage and security of your personal information

Unfortunately, no data transmission over the Internet or any website can be guaranteed to be secure from intrusion.

However, we maintain commercially reasonable physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect your personal information in accordance with applicable data protection laws. All information within our control is stored on our secure servers (or secure hard copies) and accessed and used subject to our security policies and standards.

• Where Markel International discloses your personal data to a third party, we require that third party to have appropriate technical and organisational measures in place to protect your personal data.
• Where we have given you (or where you have chosen) a password which enables you to access certain parts of our website or any other portal we operate, you are responsible for keeping this password confidential and for complying with any other security procedures that we notify you of. We ask you not to share a password with anyone.

Your personal information may be accessed by staff or authorised third parties and, transferred to, and/or stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (EEA) and UK where the data protection laws may be of a lower standard than in the EEA and UK. Regardless of location or whether the person is an employee or contractor we will impose the same data protection safeguards that we deploy inside the EEA and UK.

8. Retention of your personal information

We will retain your personal information for as long as is reasonably necessary for the purposes listed in section 2 of this privacy policy. This may mean that we hold your personal information for some time where, for instance, there is a possibility that it may be needed in connection with a claim under an insurance policy or the advisory services, or where we are obliged to keep it to comply with tax, accounting, regulatory or legal requirements.

For unsuccessful and perspective candidate data, we will retain this data in line with our retention schedule, with the only purpose being to offer you roles similar to the one(s) in which you had applied for and other suitable roles in accordance with your criteria and work history. This data will not be shared with any third parties. 

It is also noted that all candidates retain the right to request a data erasure request at any time, by contacting out Data Protection Officer as set out in Section 10 below. Once submitted, Markel will act upon and erase all data relating to this candidate. 

In exceptional circumstances, we may retain your personal information for longer periods of time if we reasonably believe there is a prospect of litigation, in the event of any complaints or there is another valid business reason the data will be needed for a longer period. We maintain a data retention policy which we apply to all data in our care. Where your personal information is no longer required we will ensure it is securely deleted.

9. Your rights

Data protection laws give you rights in relation to the personal information we hold about you, which may include the right to require us to:

• provide you with further details on the use we make of your personal information
• provide you with a copy of the personal information we hold about you
• update any inaccuracies in the personal information we hold about you
• delete any of your personal information that we no longer have a lawful ground to use
• where processing is based on consent, stop that particular processing by withdrawing your consent
• object to any processing based on our legitimate interests unless our reasons for undertaking that processing outweigh any prejudice to your data protection rights and where it is processed for direct marketing (including profiling relevant to direct marketing) restrict how we use your personal information whilst a complaint is being investigated
• use human intervention, in certain circumstances where you have been subjected to a decision which is based solely on automated processing
• transfer your personal information to a third party in a standardised machine-readable format

In certain circumstances, we may need to restrict your rights in order to safeguard the public interest (e.g. the prevention or detection of crime) and our interests (e.g. the maintenance of legal privilege).

If you would like to invoke any of the above rights please contact the Markel Data Protection Officer, who's contact details can be found in '10. Contact us' section of this policy.

9.1. Right to Complain

If you are not satisfied with our use of your personal information or our response to any request by you to exercise your data protection rights, or if you think that we have breached any relevant data protection laws, then you have the right to complain to the data protection supervisory authority. We would, however, appreciate tche chance to deal with any of your concerns before you approach the supervisory authorities so please contact us in the first instance.

In France, the authority that supervises our processing of your personal information is the CNIL (www.cnil.fr).

If you are unsure of the authority that supervises our processing of your personal information then please contact us for further guidance.

10. Contact us

We have a data protection officer who supervises how we use personal information. You can contact our data protection officer about privacy related issues by:

• sending an email to dataprotectionofficer@markel.com
• writing to the:
  Data Protection Officer,
  Markel International,
  20 Fenchurch Street,
  London, EC3M 3AZ.

11. Changes to our privacy policy

We may change the content of our website or services without notice, and consequently our privacy policy may change at any time in the future. We therefore encourage you to review it from time to time to stay informed of how we are using personal information.

12. Personal Data and Brexit

The Markel International companies have completed the transfer of the European insurance business, its London insurance company, Markel International Insurance Company Limited (MIICL), to its Munich based insurance company, Markel Insurance SE (MISE), which addresses the transfer of personal data between the UK and EU. However, we would like to assure all data subjects your personal data is and will continue to be held securely whether you are based in the UK or not. For further information please visit Servicing EEA risks after Brexit.

In the interim, if you have any questions about your personal data in relation to Brexit then please feel free to contact our data protection officer. For details please see section 10 above.

This Privacy Policy was last updated: 10/02/2026 18:02:44V42.3