CHARTERED INSURANCE INSTITUTE OF NIGERIA

Introduction

The 22nd Professional Forum of the Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria was held at Green Legacy Resort, Abeokuta, Ogun State between Wednesday 10, September and 13th September, 2014 with the Theme: The Insurance Industry – New Trends, New Strategies. A total of five papers and a key note address from the Commissioner for Insurance were presented on issues bordering on Investment and Investors’ Interest, Financial Reporting, Product Development, Market Expansion and Penetration, Human Capital Development and Client Services.



Resolutions

The Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria should bring the HR managers of insurance institutions together emphasizing how critical Human Capital development is to achieve Financial Inclusion of the Insurance Industry and the survival of the respective companies.
The College of Insurance is a welcomed development for the Industry. The Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria should continue to promote it and the industry operators should work towards buying into the programmes of the College with the training of at least 25% of their workforce in the College.
The efforts of the Institute in promoting insurance education at secondary and tertiary institutions in Nigeria will go a long way in developing insurance penetration in Nigeria and as such the President and Council should be commended in this regard and should be support in this regard by the market operators.
The arms of the industry should set up a committee with the role of developing a more dynamic strategy in deepening insurance contribution to the nation’s GDP in line with the rebasing of the economy as the current contribution of insurance to the economy is too low to be meaningful.
That the functions of the Nigerian Insurance Industry Consultative Council should be extended to include that of serving as a lobby group for the industry as well as a platform for the pooling together of resources for the development of the Nigerian insurance market. The Council should study the concept of shared services in the industry and take steps towards their implementations.
The Nigerian insurance industry should key into the government’s policy of promoting financial literacy through aggressively promoting micro insurance and takaful insurance products.
The Forum commended the operators that had entered into partnership with telecommunication companies for the selling of insurance products and resolved that more companies should develop products which could also be sold through such platform.
The Forum encourages operators to beginning to put in place machinery that will enable them to effective transit to risk based supervision so that they will not be caught unaware by the time NAICOM could decide to introduce it as a form of regulations in the system.
The Chartered Insurance Institute of Nigeria should invite the Chief Executive Office of the Financial Reporting Council to a forum where he should address issues on financial reporting as it affects the insurance industry to Industry CEOs and CFOs.
As a result of the fact that penalties on non-compliances are on the officers of the companies and not the companies themselves, NAICOM should insists that CFOs and CFOs of insurance companies should as a matter of condition have the Directors and Officers’ Liability insurance.
The market operators should put in place machinery for growing the insurance business in Nigeria through service centred mass production of insurance products and mass marketing of the products.
The operators should work hard towards discouraging weak governance and transparency in their operations especially in the area of poor quality and timeliness of accounting and disclosures.
The Industry should set up a committee of Information Technologist and Accountants to study XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) and work out modalities for its adoption for insurance accounting reporting in Nigeria.
All those with the role in financial reporting change should be awake to the reality that the field is going to be continuously subject to change both from the standard setting Boards, Regulators and service providers especially in the area of information technology. They should therefore keep abreast with attention to details that may be required.
Financial inclusion is achieved when adults have easy access to broad range of financial products designed according to their needs and provided at affordable cost. To this regard, the Nigerian insurance industry operators should work towards developing programmes that will facilitate insurance literacy among the publics.
People are the most important assets of an organization and as such, the trade arms of the industry should through the process of self regulation, persuade their members to regularly develop this asset in the organization for the good of the entire industry.
That NAICOM should ensure that only fit and proper operators are licensed and remain in practice.
The Nigerian insurance operators should work towards the use of major Nigerian languages especially for micro insurance products.
The practitioners commended seriously the existence of the fake insurance market and asked the National Insurance Commission and the law enforcement agency to work towards the elimination of the market.