Mercer Switzerland Pension Fund Expert Services Privacy Notice 

Mercer Schweiz AG (Mercer) is committed to safeguarding the privacy of individuals whose personal data it processes in the course of, and after, providing pension fund expert services in Switzerland (you). 

This privacy notice (the Privacy Notice) describes how Mercer (we, us, our) collects personal data, and how we will use that personal data, in connection with the pension fund expert services that we provide to our clients, such as pension funds or participating employers.

If you provide to us the personal data of any third parties, including dependents or other persons who benefit from your pension benefits such as your spouse or partner, we ask that you pass a copy of this Privacy Notice to such individuals.

We may have or collect additional personal data about you in relation to other relationships that we have with you, your employer or your pension fund(s). Where we collect this additional personal data as a controller, how we collect and handle this personal data may be set out in other Mercer privacy notices found on our data protection page. 

This Privacy Notice covers the following areas:

1. Our status
2. Information we collect about you
3. How we use your personal data
4. Who we share your personal data with
5. How we protect your personal data
6. Your rights
7. Contacting us
8. Changes to our Privacy Notice

When we process your personal data in connection with the pension fund expert services we provide, we act as independent data controllers alongside the pension funds to whom we are providing our services who also act as independent data controllers. We work with our clients to meet our respective obligations under data protection law

This Privacy Notice only applies in relation to the processing of personal data that we undertake as a controller in relation to our pension fund expert services in Switzerland. It does not apply to activities that we perform as a processor on behalf of our clients. Details of such processing will be set out in the privacy notice of your pension fund.

We will collect and process some or all of the following personal data about you:

(a)  Information provided by you, your pension fund or your employer:

• date of birth;
• gender;
• marital status;
• beneficiary details (including gender and date of birth of the beneficiary and their relationship to the scheme member);
• employer name;
• pension benefits;
• salary details;pension amounts and contributions;unique identifiers, such as employee IDs or pension member ID; and
• such other information as is required to perform the tasks of a pension fund expert, including calculating the pension capital and the technical reserves of the pension fund, the production of actuarial reports, checking whether the regulatory actuarial provisions regarding benefits and financing comply with legal requirements.

In some instances we will also process categories of sensitive personal data, such as health data and your sexual orientation (Sensitive Personal Data). Sensitive Personal Data is not routinely collected by us and will only be processed where it is necessary to do so in the circumstances.

(b)  Our correspondence

If you contact us, we will typically keep a record of that correspondence.

(c)  Website and communication usage

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 you access.  Information on how we handle this type of data can be found in our website cookie notice, which can be found here.

This section sets out the purposes for which we use personal data that we collect and sets out the justifications for our processing for such purposes.

We may use your personal data for the following purposes:

(a)  Pension fund expert tasks: To undertake the tasks of a pension fund expert, including calculating the pension capital and the technical reserves of the pension fund, the production of actuarial reports, checking whether the regulatory actuarial provisions regarding benefits and financing comply with legal requirements.

Use justification: (i) compliance with legal obligations; and (ii) the legitimate interests of our client to consult and obtain the advice of a pension fund expert in connection with the operation, strategy and funding of the pension fund.

(b)   Legal and regulatory compliance: To undertake such other activities as are required in order to meet our ongoing regulatory, legal and compliance obligations, including the prevention and detection of crime, for fraud detection purposes, anti-money laundering and sanctions checks and in order to liaise with statutory bodies.

Use justification: (i) compliance with our legal obligations; and (ii) our legitimate interests which are: (a) to protect our business interests in providing our services in compliance with requests, demands and guidance from our regulators; and (b) to ensure our service offering to clients is amended as required to continue to provide those services in accordance with current regulatory guidance and best practice principles.

(c)  Data analytics: To conduct benchmarking, modelling and data analytics in order to better understand issues relevant for assessing pensions and insured liabilities, such as life expectancy, and to better understand and improve the quality of, and to market, our advice, products and services. The output of such analytics will not identify particular clients or individuals.

Use justification: our legitimate interests which are: (a) to enable us to provide professional, effective and valuable services to our clients; and (b) to ensure our services are continuously improved and updated.

(d)  Effective communication with our clients: To conduct our business, including to respond to our clients’ queries and to otherwise communicate with our clients, including to inform them of changes to our services and products and to handle claims.

Use justification: (i) the legitimate interests of our clients to receive information about their services; or (ii) our legitimate interests which are: (a) to keep our clients informed about relevant services; (b) to ensure our service offering, and any changes to that offering, is communicated to clients using the most appropriate and effective method; (c) to enable us to provide professional, timely and efficient services to our clients; and (d) to ensure our client relationships are well managed.

(e)  Legal claims: to establish, exercise or defend legal claims, potential legal claims or complaints.

Use justification: (i) our legitimate interests which are (a) to defend ourselves against legal or regulatory claims brought against us or our affiliates; or (b) to enforce our legal rights including the commencement and carrying out of legal and court proceedings, where necessary; and (c) to recover any payments due to us, (ii) legal claims.

(f)   To reorganise or make changes to our business: To share data as part of any due diligence process, or following a sale or reorganisation, in the event that we: (i) are subject to negotiations for the sale of all or part of our business to a third party; (ii) are sold to a third party; or (iii) undergo a reorganisation.

Use justification: our legitimate interests which are to allow us to change our business.

(g) To provide you with marketing material: To provide you with updates and offers, where you have chosen to receive these. We may use your personal data to provide you with data about products or services which we think would be of interest to you. We may also share your personal data with our affiliates within the Marsh McLennan corporate group (“Marsh McLennan Affiliates”) so that they can provide you with data about their products and services. These may be sent by email, SMS, phone, fax or post.

Within Marsh McLennan, we operate under a number of brands and you may receive such communications from our different trading names, such as, Mercer, Mercer Marsh Benefits (MMB), Darwin, Marsh, Marsh Commercial, Marsh Networks and others.

We take care to ensure that our marketing activities comply with all applicable Swiss legal requirements. In some cases, this may mean that we ask for your consent in advance of us or Marsh McLennan Affiliates sending you marketing materials.

In all cases, you can always opt out of receiving marketing communications from us or Marsh McLennan Affiliates, at any time. We will always provide an option to unsubscribe or opt-out of further communication on any electronic marketing communications sent to you or you may opt out by contacting us as set out below.

Please note that, even if you opt out of receiving marketing messages, we may still send you communications in connection with the services we provide to you.

Use justification: (i) consent; (ii) the legitimate interests of our clients and their employees which are to receive information about the most up-to-date, accurate and secure services we can offer; and (iii) our legitimate interests which are (a) to keep our clients informed about relevant services and (b) to ensure our client relationships are well managed.

We may share your personal data with the following categories of recipients:

(a)  our clients, such as your employer, former employer or the relevant pension scheme trustees and their respective service providers or such other third parties as they instruct us to release the personal data to on their behalf;

(b)  law enforcement bodies, third party agencies and sanctions lists, in connection with the prevention or detection of criminal activities, including fraud;

(c)  public authorities, regulators and government bodies, where this is necessary for us to comply with our legal and regulatory obligations;

(d)  advisers, including legal advisers, loss adjusters and claims investigators, in connection with the investigation, exercise or defence of legal claims;

(e)  third parties (and their advisers) in the event of a sale or reorganisation of our business; and

(f)   third party suppliers to whom we have outsourced certain activities, who process personal data on our behalf.

We maintain commercially reasonable physical, electronic and procedural safeguards to protect your personal data in accordance with data protection legislative requirements.

All personal data that we hold is stored on our, or our third party suppliers’, secure servers and only accessed and used subject to our security policies and standards.  

Your personal data may be accessed by staff, affiliates or suppliers in, transferred to, and/or stored at, a destination in the member states of the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or the United States.  We will, in all circumstances, safeguard personal data as set out in this Privacy Notice.

Where we transfer personal data to the member states of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we rely on the Federal Data Protection and Information Commission’s findings of adequacy in respect of these territories (the list of such findings of adequacy can be found here). Where we transfer personal data to the United States, we rely on MMC’s Binding Corporate Rules applicable to the transfer of personal data outside Switzerland.

Please contact us as set out below if you would like to see a copy of the specific safeguards applied to the export of your personal data.

We will retain your personal data for as long as is necessary for the processing purpose(s) for which it was collected and any other permitted linked purpose (for example where we are required to retain personal data for longer than the purpose for which we originally collected it in order to comply with certain regulatory requirements). Our retention periods are based on business needs and personal data that is no longer needed is either irreversibly anonymised (and the anonymised data is retained) or securely destroyed.

If you have any questions or concerns about how your personal data is handled in connection with your pension scheme, we recommend that you first contact the trustee of your pension fund. However, under certain conditions, you have the right to ask us to:

a)    provide you with further details on the use we make of your data;

b)    provide you with a copy of data that you have provided to us;

c)    update any inaccuracies in the personal data we hold; and

d)    delete any personal data that we no longer have a lawful ground to use,

and to:

e)    object to any processing that we justify on the basis of our or our client’s interests unless our reasons for undertaking that processing outweigh any prejudice to your data protection rights;

f)     object to direct marketing (including any profiling for such purposes);

g)    restrict how we use your data whilst we consider your inquiry; and

h)    where processing is based on consent, you have the right to withdraw your consent by contacting us at the contact details below or as indicated when consent was given.

You can exercise these rights by contacting us as set out in the “contacting us” section below. Your exercise of these rights is subject to certain exemptions 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 exercise any of these rights we will check your entitlement and respond in most cases within a month.

If you are not satisfied with our use of your personal data or our response to any exercise of these rights you have the right to complain to the Federal Data Protection and Information Commission.

If you have any questions or concerns about how your personal data is handled in connection with your pension scheme, we recommend that you first contact the trustee of your pension fund.

If you have any questions in relation to this Privacy Notice, please contact our Data Protection Officer at privacy@mmc.com or at:

Data Protection Officer

Mercer

Tessinerplatz 5

8027 Zurich

Switzerland

We may change our Privacy Notice from time to time in the future. If we change this Privacy Notice, we will update the date the Privacy Notice was last changed below.

This Privacy Notice was last updated in April 2025.