By ROSEMARY ONUOHA
NICON Insurance Plc has been suspended from the Nigerian Insurers Association, NIA, after refusing to appear before the Customer Complaint Bureau of the association.

Chairman of NIA, Mr. Olusola Ladipo-Ajayi who announced the suspension during a media parley at the NIA secretariat in Lagos last week stated that the company remains suspended until it responds to the call of the bureau.

It will be recalled that the NIA established a Customer Complaint Bureau about two years ago to act as a medium of conflict resolution between insurance companies and their customers. Consequently, an aggrieved customer of NICON who took his complaints to the bureau was rebuffed by the company by consistently refusing to appear before the Bureau after several requests were made.

Announcing the suspension, Ladipo-Ajayi revealed that the governing council of NIA took the decision after the company consistently refused to appear before the bureau.

He said: “Following NICON’s decision not to appear before the bureau, the Governing Council of the Association, at its meeting of Thursday, January 26, 2012, resolved to suspend the company from the association. That decision has been communicated to the company.”

The NIA chairman said that the Customer Complaint Bureau has continued to blaze the trail in conflict resolution since it was established two years ago, adding that the bureau has so far resolved many issues to the satisfaction of all the parties; the insured and the underwriter.“

According to Ladipo-Ajayi, the fact that members respect the decision of the bureau is a further attestation to the high esteem in which the bureau is held.

Meanwhile, reacting to news reports that the Nigerian Insurance Industry Database (NIID) is a failure, the NIA chairman stated that the NIID project will succeed only that it will take time.

He said, “One key objective of the NIA is to collate insurance data from its members and generate reliable insurance statistics and other information to all stakeholders hence the NIID is an information technology-based system that will facilitate easy collation and dissemination of statistical and other information relating to insurance on one hand, and also serve as a vehicle for easy identification of genuine insurance documents by relevant authorised persons.”

He listed other objectives of the system to include monitoring and authenticating insurance transactions documents; reducing incidences of fraudulent insurance transactions and policies most especially for motor and marine policies; reducing red tape and corruption by integrating with the vehicle registration system of the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), the Police, and other relevant government agencies; ensuring easy access to statistical data for effective decision- making.

Ladipo-Ajayi noted that the National Insurance Commission, NAICOM, and other stakeholders such as the NPF, FRSC and the Nigerian Council of Registered Insurance Brokers, NCRIB, have all signified sufficient interest in ensuring the acceptance of the system as the industry’s database.