Trust, Innovation, and Growth: NAICOM CEO Charts Future for Nigeria’s Insurance Market

The National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) has unveiled a comprehensive strategy to transform Nigeria’s insurance sector, focusing on trust, innovation, and inclusive economic growth. Speaking at a high-profile forum with leaders from banking, capital markets, pensions, fintech, professional services, and the real economy, Olusegun Ayo Omosehin, Commissioner for Insurance and CEO of NAICOM, described the initiative as a turning point for the industry.
“Insurance must evolve from low penetration and limited public confidence to become a strategic driver of resilience, growth, and relevance for households, micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs), and national development,” Omosehin said.
The regulator’s guiding principle is clear: “Regulation that builds trust and unlocks growth.” Omosehin outlined three core objectives for purposeful regulation:
Protect Policyholders: By enforcing clear conduct standards, timely claims settlement, strong capital buffers, and credible enforcement.
Enable Innovation: Through technology-friendly rules that reduce friction for digital product development, alternative data usage, and distribution, while ensuring consumer protection.
Strengthen Market Discipline: Ensuring competition rewards solvency, governance quality, transparent pricing, and service excellence, rather than regulatory loopholes or arbitrage.
Reform Context: NIIRA 2025 as a Catalyst
The Insurance Reform Act 2025 (NIIRA 2025) is a cornerstone of this transformation. “NIIRA 2025 provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to modernize the insurance rulebook, enhance governance and prudential standards, accelerate digitization, and expand access,” Omosehin said.
NAICOM’s agenda under this reform emphasizes five mutually reinforcing priorities:
Financial Soundness: Implementing risk-based capital requirements and ORS-driven supervision scaled to the complexity of operations.
Governance & Compliance: Strengthening fit-and-proper leadership, board accountability, and robust risk and audit functions.
Consumer Fairness: Guaranteeing transparent product terms, disciplined pricing, timely claims settlement, and functional redress mechanisms.
Market Conduct & Practices: Leveraging data-driven surveillance, reducing fraud, ensuring underwriting discipline, and maintaining claims reserving integrity.
Innovation & Digitization: Rolling out sandboxes and fast-track approvals for micro, parametric, and embedded insurance products, backed by cyber and data safeguards.
Balancing Enforcement, Flexibility, and Speed
Omosehin emphasized that effective regulation is not a tradeoff but a delicate balance:
Firm Where It Matters: Capital adequacy, liquidity, reinsurance quality, claims discipline, and truthful disclosures remain non-negotiable.
Flexible Where It Helps: Proportional requirements for microinsurers and digital natives, outcome-based rules, and sandbox pathways for new insurance models.
Faster Where It Counts: Digitized filings, service-level commitments for approvals and market entries, and streamlined regulatory interactions to reduce delays and costs for consumers.
Data-Driven Transparency to Build Trust
The regulator plans to publish firm-level metrics on claims turnaround, complaint resolution, and service quality. “Penetration improves where trust is consistent,” Omosehin said. “Consumers should choose insurers based on transparent service performance, not slogans.”
NAICOM is also fostering ecosystem-wide collaboration:
Operators: Co-designing practical rules, modernizing agency and brokerage models, and combating fraud.
Financial & Professional Services: Partnering with banks, mobile money operators, telcos, pension funds, and capital markets to mainstream premium financing, embedded insurance, and risk-based infrastructure financing.
Policymakers: Aligning policies and reforms to expand insurable risks and create investible pools.
Consumer Associations: Elevating financial literacy, mediation, and redress.
Next Steps for NAICOM
Omosehin outlined concrete actions the commission will take:
Publish a phased risk-based capital and governance roadmap with proportionality for smaller and specialist players.
Operationalize an innovation pathway with defined timelines, sandbox cohorts, and standard APIs for supervisory data.
Issue market conduct rules with measurable service-level agreements (SLAs) for claims and complaints, along with quarterly public reporting.
Digitize core regulatory interactions, including licensing, product filings, and returns.
Strengthen cross-regulator coordination with the CBN, SEC, and FCCPC to streamline approvals and reduce duplication.
“The regulator sets the floor and the tempo,” Omosehin said, “but transformation requires discipline and partnership across the ecosystem. Operators must invest in governance and service. Partners in banking, pensions, capital markets, and telecoms must integrate protection into customer journeys. And consumer advocates must continue holding the system accountable.”
The ultimate goal, he stressed, is a stronger, more competitive, and developmental insurance market—one that protects Nigerians against life’s uncertainties, mobilizes long-term savings into productive investment, and positions Nigeria as Africa’s most dynamic financial hub.
NAICOM CEO Olusegun Ayo Omosehin unveils Nigeria’s insurance sector transformation, emphasizing trust, innovation, digitalization, and inclusive growth under NIIRA 2025 reforms.