Mr. Edwin Igbiti is the Managing Director, AIICO Insurance. In this interview with ABIOLA ODUTOLA, he explains that in spite of some industry challenges, Nigerians should not shy away from exploring investment opportunities in the insurance sector. Excerpts:
How would you assess insurance penetration in Nigeria?
Insurance in Nigeria is still growing and the people are beginning to have a change of mind towards the general mentality that insurance brokers are fraudsters.
But the industry has not been able to rid the sector off agents/ staff that allegedly fleeced policy holders of their hard earned money. For instance, the case involving one Mr. Bode Aladesanmi, who is a staff of your company easily comes to mind….
(Cuts in) Mr. Aladesanmi is a registered agent with our company and not a staff.
The allegation against him is that he collected premiums (money) from several clients and diverted the fund for personal use. How did this happen and what is the update on the issue?
We found that he collected money from policy holders, which is wrong. It is clearly written on all our documents that potential and existing clients should not pay for policies through any agent, staff or representatives. When you pay cash to them, it is equal to you going to the bank, seeing someone in front of the bank with its ID card and paying him without collecting teller. We don’t encourage that. We always ask our clients to make the deposits themselves without intermediaries. There are several multiple payment channels our clients can pay through.
What is the update on that case?
We have reported the case to the Nigeria Police and they have declared him missing as he had absconded. We understand that a bad egg can tarnish the integrity of the whole industry but we don’t want that to happen because at the end of the day, we build on trust and trust is fundamental. For the fact that one out of our 3,800 agents is bad, does not mean everybody is the same.
Your type of business might not be able to survive without agents or marketing executives. What is your relationship with the agents in the industry and what measures are in place to curb agents’ excesses?
Using intermediaries is the critical way insurance is sold anywhere in the world. Based on our own internal analysis, we believe that one intermediary per 1,000 citizens in Nigeria is very low. There are actually not enough agents in the country. The agency model that AIICO runs is a tied agency model, which means that they are tied and duty bound by their contract to sell and represent AIICO Insurance alone. We have put a lot of quality control measures in place to curb excesses. We have a very stringent selection procedure for engaging our sales people. We ensure that they are people with requisite educational background and they are also mandated to provide guarantors as we ensure they are trained and our training is the best in Africa; because we have different layers of training for them.
What measures are in place to curb fraud on the part of staff/agent?
We have a clear ‘on-boarding process.’ The moment your policy is submitted to AIICO, we have an independent customer on-boarding team that calls our customers to welcome them to AIICO Insurance policy. They will explain the terms of the policy and the ways they operate the policies. On payment, every customer also gets electronic alert via the SMS, to indicate that their payment has been received by AIICO.
What efforts has the company made to assure victims of alleged fraud that their money will be refunded?
We have reached out to the affected clients to understand what actually happened and investigation is still on. We have been calling them to assure and promise them that we will notify them on details. We also update them on findings from the Police.
Aside from training your agents, what other incentives do you have, to boost their loyalty?
We have agency managers that have been with us for over 40 years. Loyalty has been structured in our system. The agency network is one of our outstanding templates and Unique Selling Points. None of our competitors can copy our agency’s network because it is capital intensive.
Any punitive measure?
Whenever we find agents that engage in misdemeanour, we are strict on them. We are known to terminate their contracts. We come down heavily on them because we do not tolerate indiscipline and breach of trust.
