We study a symmetric Markov extension of k-algebras N → M, a certain kind of Frobenius extension with conditional expectation that is tracial on the centralizer and dual bases with a separability property. We place a depth two condition on this extension, which is essentially the requirement that the Jones tower N → M → M 1 → M 2 can be obtained by taking relative tensor products with centralizers A = C M 1 N and B = C M 2 M . Under this condition, we prove that N → M is the invariant subalgebra pair of a weak Hopf algebra action by A, i.e., that N = M A . The endomorphism algebra M 1 = End N M is shown to be isomorphic to the smash product algebra M#A.