ATB TechSoft Solutions, a Nigerian software company has reinforced their belief in Nigerian software and their engineers with the announcement of their locally made product, Ultisure. Mr. Abiodun Atobatele, the Chief Executive Officer of the company announced the release of Ultisure during an interview with Vanguard.
Atobatele spoke of how Ultisure was the first of an array of products in the pipeline which has been developed through 7 years of hard work by his team of intelligent Nigerians.
Ultisure aims to bridge the gap in the insurance industry that according to Atobatele can not filled by foreign software,”Our intention is to make our customers happy and for them to leverage on our solutions to automate their businesses to make more money, better decisions and more profit at the end of the day.”
The Nigerian insurance sector is faced with a challenge that is unique to the country, that is that none of the insurance building software’s around the world can fit into the Nigerian system. Atobatele argued that most Nigerian insurance companies try to constantly change software, “They buy from India today, they abandon it in two years time, they go to South Africa, buy and abandon, they keep abandoning, and some just manage what they have.” This affects the business of insurance as it makes it difficult for customers to understand and benefit from insurance. He added that “we have subject matter experts in insurance in our organisation that has spent more than two decades working in insurance,” this gives the company a deep understanding of the insurance sector in Nigeria. This understanding is what inspired the development of Ultisure which aims to tackle all the gaps that foreign software cannot.
When asked what exactly is it that the software offers, Atobatele said that “Ultisure is an insurance underwriting management system. Since one of the problems of the insurance industry is that they jettison insurance software a lot because they are built specific to products and when those products change due to regulatory situations or new products are introduced, it is impossible to have them into new software. But our system is scalable across any kind of products. You can add new products unto the system and make it support the line of business as quickly as possible.”
With Ultisure, all that is need is a computer or internet access and it will work anywhere. This allows insurance companies to open a branch that is virtual and have an agent wherever they have to sell. In retail insurance, the product allows insurance companies to develop a solution right now that is retail for the users directly. Atobatele explained how it would work using the example of motor insurance, “we can expose an e-commerce site or connect using SMS technology where any individual can purchase insurance right away from anywhere they are, leveraging on our solution.”
Atobatele believes they have a solution will revolutionise automobile insurance in Nigeria. He explained that “The reason why most people buy third party policy is because they want to avoid police arresting them. They feel that comprehensive insurance is too expensive. So they don’t see insurance as a product or a service that they are purchasing.”
His solution aims to bring the price of comprehensive insurance down so that people will pay the same amount as the cost for a third party insurance, this will be done through what they call usage based insurance. Usage based insurances will see devices installed into vehicle that will track its location, so when the car is parked you don’t have to pay for insurance. Atobatele added that right now, insurance companies use the cost of the vehicle to calculate the cost of premium for comprehensive policy. However, their solution with usage based insurance means that you pay for what you use. “So these are the type of things that technology can do, using internet of things,” he concluded.
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