African Alliance Insurance Plc said it paid over N43.4 billion claims under the leadership of Joyce Ojemudia, the immediate past managing director/CEO of the underwriting firm.
Ojemudia, who resigned from the underwriting firm on June 7, 2024 having worked there for four years – since October 2020, is as an astute manager who believes in goals setting as a pivot to success?
On resuming at African Alliance in 2020, she drew a road map for the corporate success of the organisation, cutting across the various operational aspects of the company, where she also ensured settlement of the PTAD legacy debt of N1.3 billion in 2021 which has been pending for over 5 years before she joined the company.
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Given her solid background in cost management, she was able to improve the company’s negative solvency margin by 67 percent, and there was also a consistent 12 percent year on year reduction in operating cost culminating in a 36 percent cost reduction in three years.
This strategy culminated in sterling achievement that was recorded in several aspects of the business. Specifically, the following top six priority areas were her focus: Claims & Legacy debts, Improved Solvency Margin & Cost Management, Deployment of Technology, Marketing & Relationship Management, Technical and Enhanced Manpower Development.
In the first full year of being at the helm of affairs, she took giant strides embarking on some strategic and laudable initiatives, which impacted the company positively within 3 years.
Joyce Ojemudia believes that technology is the bedrock for success of any modern business in all ramifications and therefore initiated the deployment of a new core business application software to take the business to the next level. She also embarked on website revamp aimed at enabling a seamless digital sales capability.
As a seasoned insurance sales professional, Ojemudia knows that the insurance market is Brokers driven, so ingeniously led her team to initiate effective collaboration with Insurance Brokers through their constituent body (the NCRIB) as well as identified individual High net-worth Brokers to curry their patronage leading to 34 per cent growth in GPI.
She deployed her risk management expertise to achieve a significant drop in reinsurance expenses saving about N360 million, and 65 per cent drop in corporate claims.
Besides, the introduction of annuity verification led to savings of over N300 million for the company.
All these put together contributed to bringing about an improvement in underwriting profit from a previous loss position.
Being a strong believer in human capital development as a basis for organisational growth, Ojemudia deployed her leadership to enhance human capital of the company. She established the first ever “African Alliance Insurance Learning Academy” that serves as hub to transit the company into a learning organisation. She initiated a reward and recognition system to celebrate deserving employees and gave unparalleled attention to staff welfare and compensation and benefits.
