By ROSEMARY ONUOHA
The National Insurance Commission, NAICOM, has mandated insurance, reinsurance and broking firms to regularly organise Anti Money Laundering/Combating Financial Terrorism, AML/CFT training for their staff and all facilitators for such trainings must be duly approved by NAICOM.

Failure to get NAICOMs approval before engaging any facilitator for AML/CFT training will henceforth attract sanctions for any defaulting company.

Assistant Director (Inspectorate), Head AML/CFT Unit of NAICOM, Mr. Sam Onyeka, said this at the 2012 AML/CFT workshop for compliance and internal audit officers of insurance, reinsurance and CEOs of insurance, broking firms in Nigeria last week which was organised by NAICOM.

Onyeka said “Companies are required to submit AML/CFT employee training program to the Commission and Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, NFIU, not later than the 31st December every financial year against the next year. The aim of this requirement is to enable the Commission and NFIU conduct analyses of the submitted training plan and determine their suitability or otherwise and to direct rectification as may be appropriate.”

Onyeka said the move became necessary because many insurance operators choose to engage facilitators that lack basic knowledge on insurance.

According to Onyeka, companies are required to institute and maintain regular training for employees and to take appropriate measures from time to time to expose their employees whose duties include the handling of relevant aspects of the insurance business to the company’s procedures for verifying clients as well as training them in the recognition and handling of transactions carried out by, or on behalf of, any person who is, or appears to be, engaged in money laundering or terrorist financing.

The timing, coverage and content of the employee training programme, according to Onyeka, will vary from institution to institution, depending on the size, nature of service and products, customer base, global reach and resources.

His words “Training should, therefore, be tailored to meet perceived needs of the organisation. A comprehensive training plan should cover the following staff: compliance officers, new staff-as part of the orientation program for those posted to the front office, operations staff, especially underwriting, accounting reinsurance and claims, internal control/audit staff, managers as well as any other category of staff as may be deemed necessary”.

Onyeka said that the awareness raising and training should cover not only the need to know the true identity of the policyholder, but also, where business relationship is being established, stating “There is need to know enough about the type of business activities expected in relation to the policyholder at the outset, to know what might constitute suspicious transaction at a future date, and the circumstance that would give rise to reasonable grounds for suspicion.”

Onyeka added that policyholder identification otherwise called “Know Your Customer (Policyholder) requirement is probably the most important requirement and underpins all anti-money laundering procedures and that companies are required to obtain satisfactory evidence of identity of all proposers while the evidence must be satisfactory from both objective and subjective standpoints.