Lady Chukwuma
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Chuks Udo Okonta
Nigeria Reinsurance Corporation in a bid to improve underwriting practice and claims administration had conducted a training for its customers.
Its Managing Director, Lady Isioma Chukwuma, at the training done in conjunction with GIC India and South Africa in Lagos, said the company as parts of its reawakening has trained reinsurance managers on how to handle reinsurance business.
Lady Chukwuma said one of the services rendered by the company is providing regular training for its customers, noting that the trainings were offered free.
“As a reinsurance company, Nigeria Re is known for the regular training of cedants. For years, we have not done it and so we thought that the time had come for us to provide this training, again, for our cedants. This particular session has been targeted for the reinsurance managers.
“We believe that by so doing, we would have trained them to be more knowledgeable and when they are knowledgeable about what they are doing, we will benefit from it.
“They will do better underwriting and less claims will hit the insurance market and less claims will come to the reinsurer. At the end, it will be a win-win situation for everybody. Companies will do profitable business because they are more aware and knowledgeable of what they doing and the reinsurance will also write profitable businesses.
“Also on rendering good service to our cedants, we have been able to pay a lot of big claims that is in the market. Our cedants are more than ever before confident that we can perform our obligations. We are also happy to have been able to meet all our obligations,” she said.
She called on underwriters to ensure local capacities are fully exhausted before ceding their risks abroad.
“What we are saying is that the local market should make sure that at least they exhaust what we have in the market. There is no way we can say we have adequate capacity. We are not claiming that we have adequate capacity to cover the risk we have presently. All we are asking is that they should give the local market, the local reinsurance first proposal to take up their capacity, exhaust their own local capacity before they do businesses abroad because come to think of it reinsurance is all about the spreading of risks so we are not saying they should retain everything locally. Let them exhaust local capacity before taking them abroad,” she said.
She expressed displeasure over flauntIng of the local content law by underwriters, stressing that in spite the law issued by the National Insurance Commission (NAICOM), insurance companies are are abiding to the rules.
“The regulator – NAICOM has actually helped by issuing out circulars to the market that local content policy should be followed i.e 70 per cent local and then 30 can be taken out. But then companies are not yielding to that circular so what we are having is lack of compliance and once there is lack of compliance there is also penalty. There is no way of enforcing, there is no way of checking. Yes circulars have gone out but how do you ensure circulars are strictly adhered to that’s the challenge we are facing. Yes the regulator is helping us to ensure that local content is exhausted but they are not monitoring to ensure strict compliance to the circulars they’ve carried out,” she posited.
