‘We know the value of taking care of our customers’

Mubo Olasoko is the managing director/CEO of Meristem Registrars Limited. In this interview, she spoke about the industry and other issues. Excerpts

The Registrar business in Nigeria dates back to decades ago; can you refresh our memory on how it all began?

The Registrar business in Nigeria dated back to about 45 years ago; it started as a department in some of the companies then like First Bank, Union Bank and UBA. They all had different names back then and were the first companies listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange at that time.
They had a large number of shareholders and had to create a department to manage the large number of shareholders. Then, with development creeping into the economy and other companies beginning to also to have large numbers of shareholders there was need to also create a department to manage that growing shareholder base.

That now brought about the need for an outsourced service and that gave birth to the Registrar business in the country. Interestingly, the people that started it are still the biggest in the market, though other people have since joined them.

Talking about value of the sector, it is difficult to put a value to the sector because it is pretty much of private enterprises. To measure the value, you will need some metrics that are not readily available or handy.

Some segments of the public contend that aside people that play in the financial sector or those who own stocks, a larger percentage of the Nigerian public do not seem to know much about what Registrars do. What is your take on this?

I think that can be traced to the fact that we only relate with the people who need the services of Registrars –the shareholders. If you compare the population of Nigeria and that of people who own shares or shareholders you will find that the population is still very small.

That said, every investor who has his shares listed in the stock market will surely need a Registrar and is bound to be aware of what the Registrar service offering is about. Registrars are responsible for managing the registers of shareholders of any company; we also pay dividends to shareholders of companies as declared.

Again, a section of the shareholders population often claim that Registrars do not take as much care of their interest as they should ordinarily do. Why is this so? How has Meristem been able to address the complaint?

This notion is changing with time. I think the complaint can be traced to the peculiar problem that we had then in the country. Then, companies were not really taking good care of their customers, but we know now that cannot continue to be. Businesses have realised that there is the need for them to take care of their customers. Customers will complain if they are not taken care of, that is why it appears that shareholders and the Registrars are always at loggerheads.

If you interrogate the issue, you will find out that there are genuine reasons why some of those issues are so. Maybe the shareholder will want to have his way; maybe he is coming to make an enquiry and the Registrar is asking him to do certain things before that is done and that becomes a problem. For us at Meristem, we know the value of taking care of our customers. Though we are very young in the market, yet we have taken very giant strides and that is because we have learnt to take care of our customers.

Even though it is the companies that outsourced services to us, we know that ultimately the people that we are providing services for are the shareholders; and if the shareholders complain it comes back to us. So, what are we doing to take care of them? We own our office; it was purposely built and strategically located so that shareholders can have easy access to us. We see this location as central, wherever you are coming from it is easy to access this place. Secondly, the normal closing time for Registrar companies in Nigeria is 2:00 pm, but Meristem Registrars has extended our closing time to 4:00pm so that we can have more time to attend to our customers. We also realised that there are those that are internet savvy amongst our customers, for those category of customers, we have facilities in place to service them and make them happy.

The high level of unclaimed dividends in the capital market is a concern to all stakeholders in the industry, what is your firm doing to address the issue?

The issue is what the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Nigerian Stock Exchange are trying to address. To me, it seems like a huge sum of money but it is something that has been accumulating over time; and if you look at the way the problem is being solved you will find out that the percentage is far less than what it used to be.

I believe that the quantum of the unclaimed dividends has greatly reduced even though it may seem huge because of the carry-over over time. However, for us at Meristem Registrars, we have aligned with every initiative that the regulators have come up with to solve the issue; we always ensure that we key into every initiative that the regulator introduces.

Right now, we have adopted e-payment like every other player in the sector and we encourage every shareholder to key into e-payment even though some of them do not want to imbibe e-payment, they still want to see the physical dividend warrant, have a copy of it and keep it; but every customers that walks in here, we make sure that they fill the e-mandate form so that we can update our data.

The main cause of unpaid dividends is because of lack of updated data; shareholders’ details are not updated in their bank details. We also have a list of everyone who has unclaimed dividend on our website and from time to time we also sent out emails to those that we have their emails intimating them of the list on our website and asking them to go to our website to check for their names.

We also encourage companies during their annual general meetings to always publish the names of persons with unclaimed dividends in their annual reports. We are doing all of these to make sure that the problem is reduced.