The National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) is set to enforce compulsory insurance under the Market Development and Restructuring Initiative (MDRI) in September.
The Director, Research, Statistics and Information Technology (R,S&IT) of the commission, Alhaji Adamu Balanti, stated this in Lagos recently at a meeting of the NAICOM’s steering committee to strategise on how best to implement and enforce compulsory insurance.
Balanti who spoke briefly on the recent raids in VIO offices in Abuja, stressed that the commission would continue the exercise to flush out perpetrators whose activities have been denting the integrity and image of the insurance sector.
He noted that the exercise was meant to tell Nigerians that the commission was resolute on ridding the sector of fake insurers and protecting the interest of both genuine insurers and the insuring public.
Speaking further on the compulsory insurance, the consultant on the MDRI project, Chief Yemi Soladoye, said that the enforcement teams would be trained all over the country before the enforcement exercise proper and this would be done between August and September this year when the enforcement was expected to commence fully.
To be able to make a good meaning out of the programme, he said agents would be a veritable medium for reaching the expected target.
Soladoye said for underwriters to be able to train and retain agents for reasonable productivity, steps should be take to ensure that they were treated as part of the company, adding that there was nothing wrong in an agent rising to become an executive director or even chief executive officer of an underwriting firm.
He said if agents knew they had a future in a company, not only would they want to stay put, staff in other departments would be seeking to convert to their status instead of the current situation where agents pled to be converted to full-time staff.
Also speaking, the deputy director, Authorisation and Policy, Mr. Leo Akah,informed that the commission was doing all it could to encourage the new system.
Akah said that part of that strategy was the reduction of the registration fee for agents from N15,000 to N1,000.
He hopes that the Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria (CIIN) would do the same to promote the agency business in the industry.
Mr. Akah also spoke of the Commission’s recent raid of licencing and Vehicle Inspection Officer (VIO) offices in Abuja and said that the incidence of fake insurance agents had gone quite deep.
He said the fake agents have gone beyond using the names of invalid companies to those of existing ones.
According to him, a good number of the fake insurance agents arrested during the raid were actually trading in the certificates of most of the existing companies.
Akah noted that the raid would go beyond Abuja to other major cities across the country until the incidences of fake insurance agents are curtailed.
He however pleaded with the operators to assist the Commission in its current efforts of ridden the industry of the activities of fake insurance operators.
Akah said an operator should be alarmed when he finds out that someone was trading in its name without authorization.
“If the operators could do this, a lot of grounds would be covered in the fight against the fake operators,” he said.
The NIA Director General, Mr. Sunday Thomas, said the battle against fake insurance agents would ultimately be won with migration from paper to computerized plastic policy document.
Thomas disclosed that the NIA was working hard on this and before long it would be rolled out.
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