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Chuks Udo Okonta
The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of one of the oldest insurance companies in Nigeria, Universal Insurance Plc, Dr. Benedict Ujoatuonu, said his Company is one of the leading underwriters of Bond and Guarantee Insurance in Nigeria.
He made the revelation at the 2023/2024 Annual General Meeting (AGM) of the Nigerian Association of Insurance and Pension Editors (NAIPE) held at Insurers House, Victoria Island, Lagos recently.
While highlighting some of the things that make Universal Insurance Plc thick, Dr. Ujoatuonu listed Bond and Guarantee Insurance, Local Travelers Insurance and Keke PASS Insurance as flagship products, technology adoption, and digitisation of its retail operations from end to end, amongst others.
According to him, Universal Insurance is one of the Companies in this market that is known and has expertise in Bond and Guarantee Insurance. We are one of the few Companies that profitably underwrite Bonds and Guarantee. Other people, even our reinsurance people, usually ask ‘how are you doing it? The reason is simply. It was a deliberate thought-out strategy from the beginning.
“I was a thoroughbred underwriter that has a focus on Bond and Guarantee Insurance. When I saw that a lot of Insurance Companies were running away from that business, we sat down, as a company, to look at what we could do to make this class of business profitable, we did it and it has been working for us. So one of the things you see is that when the new administration was inaugurated and government contracts started coming out, the simplest business that was coming out from there was Bond and Guarantee Insurance and we took advantage of it and it is giving us the required value,” he added.
On the flagship of the Company’s retail products, and how technology is driving its retail segment, he said “We have local travellers insurance and Keke PASS Insurance where we are having collaborations with some groups and that is also driving other areas.
“The dynamic of our retail operations is digitasation, nothing more. We have a whole lot of Web Aggregators who are taking advantage of our products and we are using their platforms. What we do is that as long as you are an Application Programming Interface (API) technology-driven technology company, we do ‘hand-shake,’ from their aggregation points, you can buy our products and do everything and it ends up directly in our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) without human intervention. So our operations are digitally organised that is the strategy we are using for our retail.
“As of today, we are already discussing with a technology company on how to deploy Artificial Intelligence (AI) for our operations. We had presentations and everything ready for deploying AI from the beginning to the end both in assessment, in adjustment, in settlement, in everything concerning our business.
“We are digitally savvy in everything we do, without it we cannot drive our retail segment, Dr. Ujoatuonu said.
Speaking on the impact of the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS 17) on insurance operations, he said the process has been challenging, adding that operators are doing everything possible to adapt to it.
“The processes leading to full adoption of the model has been challenging to all of us in the industry. It has affected our operations and reporting. But that is the system that has come to stay,” he said.
On the business environment, the MD said “The cost of running the business now is about 150 per cent higher than what it used to be and there is nothing anybody can do.”
