By ROSEMARY ONUOHA

Managing Director of Custodian & Allied Insurance Plc, Mr. Wole Oshin has charged insurance operators to change the stereotype ways with which they run the insurance business and embrace innovation.

Oshin who was the keynote speaker at the 2014 Champion Insurance day luncheon in Lagos last week stated that with the way things are going, if insurers don’t embrace change, the sector will be forced to go down.

Oshin said that insurance operators should consider combining businesses to create companies that are viable and strong which will register in the minds of Nigerians.

Oshin said, “The insurance sector has a naturally set of boring products and there is a quiet revolution creeping in, in the form of the internet which can be termed a destructive innovation if not tapped into positively. As such, the population of people that will buy our products are on the internet. So we need to prepare ground because if we don’t embrace the change, it will not augur well for the sector.

“Technology is a distorter and could be a real threat to the existence of the insurance sector because history has shown that sometimes IT companies come to destroy other sectors e.g., music industry, bookshop industry. In such cases, technology can be said to be a destructive element. So we the insurance operators need to redefine our industry before any destructive element tears us down,” Oshin said.

According to him, insurance players need to change the ways they do things, even as he stressed that size and capacity of operators are critical.

Oshin said that with the rebased Gross Domestic Product, GDP, of the Nigerian economy, foreign investors are flocking into the market because they see opportunity where many Nigerians do not see it.