The Executive Officer of Afriglobal Insurance Brokers Limited, Mr. Casmir Azubuike said the Nigerian insurance industry is going through digital transformation to boost its acceptance.
Azubuike said this in a presentation titled ‘Changing the face of insurance practice’.
He said, “The Nigerian insurance industry is evolving from analog to a digitally-driven industry. Office processes are getting automated, manual registers and records are being phased out, policy and clients’ statistics are now being gotten electronically, policy documents are being generated and transferred electronically.
According to him, the insurance industry was in the past reputed for poverty, extreme conservatism, hungry and dishonesty, among others.
“The insurance industry of today has succeeded in reversing this negative image,” Azubuike said.
According to him, insurance firms’ offices and brokers now own or occupy magnificent structures located in high-brow areas, while employees are now well-remunerated, with attractive conditions of service.
He, however, noted that the industry was still grappling with challenges.
According to him, the challenges include poor product knowledge, laundering the poor image of the industry, achieving the desired penetration level, reversing the industry’s poor contribution to the GDP, addressing the low underwriting capacity issues, slow adoption of technology, poor leadership giving rise to financial mismanagement, and weak governance and regulatory bottlenecks.
He said other challenges were unavailability of reliable statistical data, lack of innovative products that addressed clients’ needs, and unprofessional and unethical conduct by practitioners, among others.
He said the face of insurance practice in Nigeria had been over the years characterised by poor image and very poorly embraced by the public.
However, he added, conscious efforts were being made by practitioners to launder the image.
“Much as some level of success are being recorded, the greater national challenges of corruption begotten by the very poor standard of living is making it difficult for the efforts to yield as expected,” he said.
According to him, the very low per capita income has relegated insurance to the least in the priority list.
“Therefore, from public alienation, the industry is beginning to experience increasing acceptance to total invigoration,” he said.
