By Maduka Nweke
Although, the Nigerian Insurance Industry Database (NIID) has not started yielding the expected profits, the Nigerian Insurers Association (NIA) has said it got N160.47 million as proceeds from the data uploads in 2016.
According to the association’s 2016 financial report, the balance in the account of the NIID as at the beginning of last year was N62.12 million, and N225,000 was received while N1.23 million stood as interest accrued on the accounts noting that its balance as at December 31, 2016 was N69.27 million. The association stated that over 8 million motor insurance certificates have been captured on NIID within the period of six years.
The Acting Director-General of NIA, Mrs Lawunmi Idowu, who disclosed this, noted that the NIID has run consistently hitch-free in the last 12 months stressing 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 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’s 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.
The Chairman of the NIA, Eddie Efekoha, stated that in the association’s desire to extend the coverage of the NIID to other states of the federation, it 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, saying that plans are being made to bring other stakeholders into the scheme.