Nigeria’s insurance industry must rethink its strategic operations and maximise its potentials by fully harnessing technology to increase the adoption of its offerings and achieve its mandate of protecting individuals and businesses across multiple industries from potential losses of different kinds.
Deremi Atanda, an Executive Director at SystemSpecs, a leading financial and human capital technology company in Africa, made this disclosure as he shared insights recently on the optimisation of fintech for insurance penetration in Nigeria. This was at the mid-year virtual workshop of the Lagos Area Committee of the Nigerian Council of Registered Insurance Brokers (NCRIB-LAC).
Atanda noted that insurance penetration in Nigeria remains unimpressive and that compliance is still largely driven by regulations as insurance is not perceived as an essential aspect of living. This, according to him, raises important questions about the place of insurance when compared with other financial services.
“We must review the adoption of technology for insurance purposes with the aim of repositioning to better meet the needs of customers in the exact manner in which they would want to be served,” Atanda said.
He added that, in examining its positioning, practitioners must reconsider if the nomenclature, ‘insurance’, and what it currently represents truly speak to how their target audience would want to consume their offerings.
The insurance industry in Nigeria must also consciously deepen technology awareness, enablement and advancement in its operations. “In this era, technology is a platform and should be second nature to stakeholders to enable meet them meet the real demands of today,” Atanda added.
“Insurers must explore the possibility of an aggregated product market place; harness big data to track spending patterns and for key partnerships; must make informed product innovations; and adopt technology for effective premium collection.
“Similarly, process automation is a potential gamechanger in insurance today. Therefore, the insurance industry must implement end-to-end online policy subscription and payment while also maximising artificial intelligence, cloud hosting and blockchain technology.”
Noting that SystemSpecs, the developers of Remita, HumanManager and Paylink, is ready to help transform the financial technology experiences of the sector, Atanda reemphasised the place of fintech as a veritable tool to unlock the huge and largely untapped potentials of insurance in Nigeria and that brokers have to be at the forefront of the transformation.
Deremi Atanda
Executive Director, SystemSpecs
