Insurers make significant progress in fight against fake motor, marine policies
With the successful deployment of Marine Insurance modul to compliment Motor Insurance module already in place under the Nigerian Insurance Industry Database (NIID), the Nigerian Insurance industry has achieved significant progress in reducing prevalence of fake insurance certificates.
The industry was said to be losing millions of naira to fake insurers who capitalize on the ignorance of the insuring public as well as lack of accessibility of the products in many parts of the country to earn illegal income in form of insurance premium.
According to the figures released by the Nigerian insurers Association(NIA), over 8 million motor insurance policies has been uploaded in the NIID, meaning increased awareness and penetration of genuine motor policies.
While 65,000 policies has also been uploaded in the marine modul, just a year after its take.
Lawunmi Idowu acting director general of the NIA said over 8 million motor insurance certificates have been captured on NIID in its six years of operations, stating that the scheme has run consistently hitch-free in the last 12 months.
She maintained that the motor module has effectively changed the face of insurance business in Nigeria as incidences of fake motor insurance certificates have drastically reduced.
According to her, the system features are constantly being enhanced to meet user’s requirements and expectations, stressing that in the period under review, additional features to the system include: upload of short term policies; SMS alert of claims upload; mobile app of ask NIID and enhanced reporting facility.
She said the marine module is being populated by member companies pending its full utilisation by relevant agencies, adding that in the coming years, the association expectation is that the NIID platform will fully integrate with all government agencies portals for real-time verification and thereby become an indispensable tool in carrying out their statutory functions and process.
Eddie Efekoha, chairman, NIA stated that the association’s desire to extend the coverage of the NIID to other states of the federation encountered the challenge of network coverage and Internet connectivity, adding that the association is taking steps to resolve the issue through the deployment of Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) code.
He noted that the marine module has been running and member companies are daily uploading on the platform, adding that at the end of May 2017, 33 member-Companies have uploaded 65,000 marine policies.
He urged members to continue to upload their marine policies, stressing that plans are being made to bring other stakeholders into the scheme.
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