The National Insurance Commission has introduced four different forms of operation guidelines in the insurance sector.
They are the Web Aggregators Operational guidelines; State Government’s Implementation of Compulsory Insurance (or State Financial Advisers) guidelines; Independent Agents Operational guidelines; and the Mutual Organisations, Associations, Community Based, Micro guidelines.
The Commissioner for Insurance, Alhaji Mohammed Kari, said that NAICOM decided to expose the draft guidelines to address the issue of low insurance penetration in the market.
He said, “In this regard, we have considered and agreed to create additional distribution channels in the market to include using the services of state governments to enforce compulsory insurance at the state level. We have further decided to explore and de-mystify the partnership type of operation for brokers and I can assure you it will open a new vista in insurance mediation in Nigeria and most importantly, it will clearly separate the professionals from the businessmen.”
The commissioner identified the limited channels of distribution as one of the major drawbacks.
He also observed that the industry had concentrated on servicing only government and corporate clients to the detriment of the retail and micro consumers.
According to him, failure to effectively enforce the compulsory classes of insurance is another challenge.
While noting that the revised micro insurance guidelines had since been exposed, he said a final and clean copy would soon be released.
He also said that the commission was about to expose the draft of the revised Code of Corporate Governance to all stakeholders.
“Not only have we always resisted change as an industry, we have actually fought against it, sometimes with silly arguments of being different or requiring more time to do what other sectors have achieved overnight,” he said.