By Ngozi Onyeakusi– Royal Exchange Plc, Nigeria’s premier insurance and financial services group,has announced its results for the 2019 financial year. The company generated a Gross Written Premium of N14.21 billion from its business activities as at ended December 31, 2019.
Making this announcement was the Chairman, Board of Directors, Mr. Kenny E. Odogwu to shareholders in his address at the company’s 51st Annual General Meeting (AGM), which held virtually, in Lagos on Thursday, 24thSeptember, 2020.
Net Premium Income for the period amounted to N8.72Billion, while Net Underwriting Income was N9.19Billion, after the addition of Fees and Commission Income, which was N479.6Million.
A further analysis of the operating results showed that the Total Assets of the group witnessed stood at N32.10billion as at December 31, 2019, with Net Claims Paid to Policyholders for the period under review amounted to N3.17Billion,
The company with interest in general insurance, life insurance, finance, healthcare as well as micro finance banking is seeking to take advantage of synergies, as a financial conglomerate in its new drive for growth.
Alhaji Rufai Mohammed, Director, Royal Exchange Plc, who stood in for the Chairman, told shareholders that the future of the company is bright, stating that the present management has done very well in growing the business and bring stability in her operations. “As always, Royal Exchange will continue to stay abreast with many of the initiatives it has put in place to grow its market share and attain market leadership position.”
According to him, the Group is currently streamlining major components of her business, service delivery, processes and operations to deliver superior returns in the short-term to the shareholders.
“This we believe will reposition our great company as not only a major industry player, but as potential game changer”. Speaking further, he addedthat “the Group was able to grow its top-line figures by participating in large-ticket financial transactions, as well as playing in the retail insurance market-a key growth driver of the future and we envision a portfolio rebalancing, whereby retail insurance market contributes 40-50 percent of our revenues seeing that we have a largely untapped market”.
“For the future that we behold, our goal is to continuously redefine, reinvent and differentiate ourselves in the market place. The focus would be on achieving sustainable growth for our company through deepening of our revenue base, improving service delivery support system and at the same time keeping a lid on our group-wide costs”.
Some of the initiatives recently undertaken to show our customer-centric approach to doing business include the deployment of world-class core-insurance software for our two insurance subsidiaries – Royal Exchange General Insurance Company and Royal Exchange Prudential Life, which have started yielding positive results by enhancing workflow and ability to respond quicker to our clientele.
Apart from the insurance software, we also created new websites for the Group and all the subsidiary companies, with the websites dedicated to their operations alone, as part of our strategic digitalization plan. The new websites have call-to-action/sales capabilities where customers can make purchases online as well.
Speaking on the recapitalization efforts for the two insurance subsidiaries, the Director noted that the efforts for the general company, REGIC are almost concluded, with another strategic investor and plans are afoot to ensure the recap exercise is completed before the end of Q4, 2020. For the Life Company, we are on course to also secure the requisite financing required to make the company meet the required deadline as stated by the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM).