NICON earmarks $10 million for restructuring

NICON Insurance Limited has reiterated its resolve to stage a comeback into the Insurance market with the injection of $10 million into its restructuring plans.

NICON, which was privatized in December 2005 with an asset base worth of N52.4 billion over a forty year period of operation is also planning to spend the sum of $2million to upgrade its IT facilities.

Bayode Samuel, NICON Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer in an interview with BusinessDay and few other National dailies disclosed that since the re-structuring of NICON which actually started in 2013 after a running battle between government and private investors said “NICON is finally ready with a clear road-map to get out of the mess it found itself in over the years.

“We are thinking of re-branding the corporation by the roadmap and the board has earmarked the sum of $10 million for the restructuring, re-branding and re-jigging of the company. The money is already sitting down somewhere.
So as we speak, NICON hasn’t returned to profitability,” Samuel said

Samuel, who made bold claims that NICON exited all claims in 2015 as directed by NAICOM also informed of the plan to partner with Oracle, a leading software giant to upgrade its IT facilities for effectiveness.

“We have invited Oracle, the software giant, they are with us in the office now, they are trying to pull down all our IT systems and install new ones and when finished we shall be on top of our games again before the second half of the year. You know the position of IT in management system in the World today so we are spending about $2 million on that.

Speaking on the company’s Students Welfare Insurance Scheme which was developed last year when he came on board as Manager, Samuel said the initiative which was welcomed by government has helped many school children to continue their education after one form of setback. He stated that parents who lost their wards in schools where the product is offered have benefited from the scheme.

“The SWIS policy is for children in school so much so that if they lose their breadwinners, we at NICON will continue to pay for their upkeep and school fees till graduation.

Also, nobody will be happy losing a child but anything can happen from incident of insecurity, flood or whatever, so what we do is to pay a token of N500 000 on the loss of the child and burial expenses of N50 000. If students are involved in an accident to the extent that they are hospitalized, we pay hospital expenses of N50 000. That is the basic thing we thought of and the government took our advise at that time”.