Director of Supervision at the National Insurance Commission (NIC), Mr Seth Eshun, has called on stakeholders in the insurance industry to make it a priority to explain to the general public the benefits of insurance.
He said it is through constant public education and sensitization that will enable the public appreciate the benefits of insurance.
Mr Eshun was speaking during H.Insured – A streetwise thought leadership platform to demystify insurance, organised by Hollard Insurance on Thursday September 9 in Accra.
The topic for this discussion was “Media and Insurance – Making insurance a Ghanaian lifestyle. There is a lot of work for us as stakeholders to do to demonstrate to the people the importance of insurance.
“Those that don’t have money they need the insurance the most. All of us have work to do demonstrate the benefit of insurance that is why the education is important.”
He further noted that although the insurance industry of Ghana’s economy has seen improvement over the years, a lot of work has to be done to improve upon the image of the industry.
Mr Eshun explained that the complaints unit within the NIC has over the years received several disturbing reports from customers of insurance companies.
These complaints, although have been worked upon, he said, there still more work to be done to deal with the issues.
Asked how the industry is performing, he stated that “If you look at the past five years the industry grows averagely about 25 per cent every year which is very good and is encouraging because we don’t see such consistent growth in any sector in Ghana.
“But you look at our total asset base, around 8billion and you compare that to the banks which is about, give or tale, 150 billion. So our asset base is about five percent of that of the banks. Even though we are growing there is still a lot of catching up.
“We have a department that handles complaint from the public about issues they have in the insurance industry.
“Traditionally most of the complaints to do with motor but now it is changing a bit. Traditionally, it was motor because we were paying premiums about 70 cedis for third party.”
He added “About four years ago, we increased this to about 327 cedis and so the insurance industry had a better capacity to pay claims and so you see that because of a better capacity to pay claims the image of the insurance industry is improving but it has come from a very bad stage.
“There is a bit more that needs to be done. If you look at what we worry about also is the issues that happened with the banks in which some banks went down.
“Two companies were affected in the insurance industry. So there is work for all of us to do to ensure that those bad events do not spoil the state of the industry.
“So the short answer to this is that there has been a lot of growth but there are still issues about image that we need to address.”
By Laud Nartey|3news.com|Ghana