By Lilian.Chukwu
Lagos – Mr Bode Akinboye, the Chief Executive Officer of the Standard Alliance Insurance, on Wednesday said that the company would begin payment of dividend to its shareholders by 2019.
Akinboye said this while speaking with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on the sideline of the company’s “Facts Behind the Figure’’ at the Nigeria Stock Exchange (NSE) in Lagos.
He apologised to the shareholders for the inability of the company to pay their dividend for years now, saying that it was due to operational challenges.
According to him, the low performance of the industry is coupled with the challenges of economic recession in the country.
“But the slow growth is beginning to reverse considering the positive growth currently being experienced in the country,” he said.
Akinboye noted that insurance sector played a passive role in the economic development in spite of its huge economic potential that remained largely untapped.
He explained that the challenges of back-log of unpaid claims and losses faced by the company slowed down its operations.
According to him, the major strategic initiatives and outlook of the company are focused on transforming it into a very profitable business via combination of its turnaround programmes and restructuring steps.
He said that the company’s strategies were focused on ensuring prompt payment of claims.
According to him, its expenditure to clear the back-log of unpaid claims between 2015 and first half of 2017 stands at N8.2 billion.
“We are currently restructuring the system to wipe out the remaining losses and unpaid claims of about N2 billion within the next one year.
“That is why we targeted 2019 to clear the debts and become a dividend-paying company, to pay our shareholders by 10 kobo,” he said.
Akinboye said that the company was working to become the leading digital insurer in Nigeria, through implementation of its digital transformation initiatives, capital investments on new underwriting and business management software.
He said it was expanding its retail market reached by increasing agency capacity to 5,000 agents that would be selling its products by 2019.
Akinboye explained that the design of new Product Yield-based Agric Insurance and the product-Salary Protection Insurance Scheme (SPIS) were some of the transformation initiatives of the firm. (NAN)
