By Prince Cookey—As digitalisation takes root across the world in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic era and the need for seamless operations, the insurance regulator in Nigeria, the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) initiated and commissioned its portal for effective regulatory processes for sustainable industry growth and development.
Dr Zainab Shamsuna Ahmed, Hon. Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning in Nigeria, recently commissioned the NAICOM portal. The portal is one of the initiatives of NAICOM being pursued to deepen the insurance market and increase the penetration to the level that is consistent with the nation’s economy.
Mr. O. S. Thomas, the Commissioner for Insurance/CEO of NAICOM, expressed delight that the portal project has become a reality and commended the support of the Minister in that regard.
“As some of us may be aware, the Commission in July 2009, embarked on a comprehensive computerisation effort tagged project e-regulation that was meant to transform its operational procedures and the conduct of its regulatory responsibilities by providing a robust, world-class ICT Infrastructure to help implement an automated business processes internally and for industry wide supervision via an integrated platform.”
He said the portal is presently made up of four systems:
The policy system – It captures ALL insurance policies issued in Nigeria online real time via Application Programming Interface (APIs). It generates a unique policy identification number for all issued policies necessary to ensure fidelity and validity of all policies in the country and manages information on all insurance policies and premiums. It enables insurance customers and third-party entities such as law enforcement agencies to query and validate insurance policies.
Licensing system – It automates the core business processes of registration/renewal of licenses, new products, AIP no objection and attestation approvals at NAICOM. All of these application processes will proceed digitally from the application stage where all supporting documents are provided, to the review stage, the approval stage and license generation where applicable.
Complaints management system – This is a customised solution designed to help the Commission manage complaints and handle issues seamlessly as well as ensure that insurance companies are performing highly and clients are serviced adequately. The system is also designed to integrate directly with NAICOM existing database, utilising existing records of customers and insurance companies; it incorporates multiple channels for initiation of complaints including social media applications (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter), direct action on the complaint portal, walk-in complainants, regular media, emails and SMS (short code) and unstructured supplementary service data (USSD).
Regulatory returns and financial analysis – It provides the platform for the submission of all insurance industry regulatory returns and compliance electronically. The financial analysis module of it aims at automating financial analysis, credit control functions, computation of levies, and providing adequate and timely information to support management decision-making as well as serve as a central repository for current and historical financial information about the insurers, re-insurers, brokers and loss adjusters.
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