e-Insurance: ICT, Insurance Experts to Generate Ideas for Penetration

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) stakeholders in Nigeria are set to dialogue with their counterpart in the insurance industry to generate ideas on how to use ICT to drive insurance penetration in Nigeria and develop appropriate framework for implementing such ideas.

The ICT and Insurance experts will on March 23, gather at the Lagos Sheraton Hotel for an E-Insurance Conference with the theme: "Driving Insurance Penetration with Information and Communication Technologies".

The conference is expected to bring together corporate organisations, ICT experts, insurance experts, academia, consumers of insurance products and regulators of both ICT and Insurance industries, to discuss how to use technology to deepen insurance penetration in Nigeria.

The conference, the first of its kind in the country, is been organised by Pinet Informatics Limited, the first Internet Service Provider in Nigeria, in collaboration with major stakeholders in Insurance and ICT industries.

Engineer Lanre Ajayi, managing director of Pinet Informatics, explained that the  event  will  bring together  practitioners in the insurance industry and that of Information  and Communication  Technology  to  share  experience,  brainstorm,  network, and conclude deals.

According to Ajayi, the  Insurance  industry  is  a  vital  part  of  the  Nigerian  economy  but  the  industry  is  not  living  up  to  its full  potential saying, "there  are  less  than 1.5 million insurance policy holders in Nigeria out of a population of 170 million,  which translates to 0.9 per cent insurance penetration.

"When compared to  23 per cent  bank  accounts  penetration, 105 per cent of telephone penetration and 55 per cent of Internet penetration,  then, there  is  a  lot  of  room  for  improvement in the insurance industry and this could be achieved by deploying the right technology, Ajayi said.

"The Nigeria insurance industry can  be  turned  around  if  the  industry transit to a technology driven one, the same way the banking industry got transformed through the infusion of information and communication technology in its service delivery processes," he said.

Ajayi who is the former President of Association of Telecommunication Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), said after the conference, there would be one week training workshop on e-Insurance for staff of insurance companies.