Swiss insurance giant Zurich Insurance has lost the
personal details of 51,000 British customersin South Africa.
The personal details of hundreds of thousands of African
customers also went missing.
A computer tape containing the customer information went missing
over a year ago when it was being transferred to a storage centre
in South Africa, the company disclosed.
Zurich Insurance, which called in KPMG to investigate, said
there is no evidence that customer details had been used to commit
fraud.
Annette Court, CEO Europe general insurance of Zurich Financial
Services Group, said the company is investing money to improve its
data security.
"Protecting our customers' interest is at the top of our agenda.
We are putting a great deal of investment into strengthening our
internal processes to ensure that incidents of this nature do not
happen again in the future."
But Jamie Cowper, marketing director EMEA at data encryption
firm PGP Corporation, said there are often dangers when customer
data is held overseas.
"Zurich UK's customers might be surprised to hear that their
data is being kept in South Africa, a country which is yet to pass
the Protection of Personal Information Bill,
its
equivalent of the Data Protection Act," he added. " However,
global trends around data outsourcing mean that
confidential customer data could be held absolutely
anywhere."