For years, Nigeria’s insurance industry has struggled to expand at a pace commensurate with the size of the economy, remaining one of the smallest contributors to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
NBS data analysed by Nairametrics on the finance and insurance sector show that financial institutions (banking) continue to dominate activity, accounting for 87.22% of total output in the second quarter of 2026, while the insurance subsector trailed with a contribution of just 12.78%.
In real terms, the finance and insurance sector contributed 3.37% to GDP in Q2 2026, with the insurance subsector contributing less than 1%.
The sector had earlier posted a real GDP contribution of 2.56% in the fourth quarter of 2025, marking a modest improvement of 0.10 percentage points over the 2.46% recorded in the same period of 2024.
Taken together, the figures suggest that despite Nigeria’s large population, the insurance sector remains largely underpenetrated, with significant room for growth yet to be explored.
And while operators in the industry have raised a combined sum of N700 billion through the recently concluded recapitalisation exercise to bolster their capacity, there is still one big problem the money cannot fix: Trust.
In this exclusive interview with Nairametrics, the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Consolidated Hallmark Insurance (C.H.I), Mary Adeyanju, discusses the challenges confronting the industry and what lies ahead.
Mary Adeyanju: Nigerians see insurance not as a product that they need. Nigerians see insurance like a scare. But actually, insurance is the product that not just Nigerians, but everybody in the world needs.
But most times, especially in our clime, we’ve not been able to drive the value to them. One of the reasons, as an institution, we’ve made up our mind that we want to change the narrative. And some of the things we’re trying to do to change the narrative is to see how we can get Nigerians to like insurance products and services.
Mind you, insurance is a product that I tell people that you don’t feel until you have a claim. So, it is not sold. It is bought.
And I say that with all sense of responsibility, because if you keep on paying for your insurance premiums year in, year out, and you have not suffered any loss, you really cannot test the efficacy or the efficiency of what you have bought until you suffer a loss.
So, we’re trying to see how we can drive the value of insurance to the people, not just the corporates that are buying insurance because they necessarily need the insurances to protect their assets, but also the individuals, the SMEs, that even need it more, because the capacity to rebuild after a loss occurs, they are the ones that really don’t mean it. So, what are we doing? We’re looking at SME products, little products that we can sell that will get across to those people.
And we’re still doing something in the works, trying to come up with the products that people need and not the products that we want to sell, because that is a gap area that we are seeing in the industry, that most of the time people are not buying because we’re selling what we are offering.
But the big question is, what’s your offering? Is that what the people really need? We’re also looking at the channels of distribution, because one very serious way to get across to the Nigerian people is to create a channel with which you can reach the masses without necessarily going from one door to the other. And that takes me to partnerships.
So, we’re trying to see how we can create partnerships and then sell through the partnerships, embed products and all of that. And these partnerships could be super agents, with bank assurance partnerships. So, we’re looking at all of this, in tweaking products, looking at channels of distribution, using technology to get across to those people.
Mary Adeyanju: Challenges we face as an insurance company, not just C.H.I, but insurance companies in Nigeria. The number one is the trust issue, which everybody knows. A lot of people don’t trust insurance, or they think insurance is a fraud, and sadly so.
And the reason is that some people have actually had dealings with insurance companies, and their experiences were not that pleasant. And so they have formed an opinion. And that opinion, they have shared with other people.
And you know, bad news travels fast. But sometimes people don’t even take time to drill down to know how those claims, the experience or the journey, how it went, so that you can really know what happened and how it happened. So that has led to a lot of trust issues, and it’s also affecting what you see today in terms of our insurance growth and our contribution to the GDP of this country. So trust is a major issue for us.
Number two, another very major issue for us, which the recently concluded recapitalization exercise has addressed, is capacity. So, the market is going to be able to retain more businesses, and of course we should be able to see more growth.
Another issue we have is technology. As one sector, if you compare us in the financial services sector, insurance seems to be the last when it comes to the use of technology. So we’re also hoping that the capital we have raised is going to also help us to invest more in technology.
Because if we do that, we’re going to be able to reach out more to people and then change the face of the industry. So the issue of technology, the issue of trust, and people. So the industry too has not been able to attract also the right kind of people, because also within the financial services ecosystem, we are like the least paid as well.
Because if you pay more, you’re going to be able to also attract the best hand. So also these things are a chain of issues that we are all collectively dealing with. So it’s not peculiar to C.H.I alone.
Although for the purposes of this interview, yes, C.H.I. But I can tell you, it is a general problem.
Mary Adeyanju: I’m sorry about that. Let me apologize. There’s always that one bad egg. Unfortunately, you dealt with the wrong one. That is not to say that insurance companies don’t pay claims.
Honestly, I would say with every sense of responsibility, we pay claims, huge claims, and we will continue to pay claims because insurance companies are established to carry risk and pay claims where they crystallize.
Even the loss that you suffered from and has not been paid, there are avenues with which you can express yourself, and you will be treated. You can report to NIA, the Nigerian Insurance Association, it is a body that coordinates and governs the affairs of the insurance industry. It’s not a regulator, but we look at all of those issues.
NAICOM is also very up on customer protection. It’s one of the strategic key pillars of this NAICOM of today, and insurance companies have been made to contribute to that consumer protection fund, seriously from our premium, to ensure that consumers or customers are protected, as it were, both in terms of their premiums or whatever they’re doing with insurance companies.
Mary Adeyanju: Let’s take 3 years as long-term and one year as short-term. I see a situation where the industry should invest more in technology, because the truth of the matter is that every business of today, I tell my people, should be a technology business that is doing something.
It should be a technology business that is selling insurance. A technology business that is selling banking, or else you’re dead in one, two years. That’s the truth.
So I see an insurance industry that has raised capital and should be able to invest in technology, should be able to invest in people, and that will help us, to be properly optimized and efficient to be able to deliver better services to our clients. And all of these kind of complaints that you just talked about should be eroded. Technology will bring speed with claims.
Like in C.H.I today, we have a technology tool called Curacel, which we are using for our motor claims. So it’s helping us with pre and post, and it’s creating a lot of efficiency with our motor claims in terms of speed of paying claims and all of that. So these are some of the things.
So when you insure your motor vehicle, typically, we’re supposed to come, inspect the car, do all of that, and be sure that the vehicle is there. Now, with this tool, once you download, you do all of the inspection, send the report to us, we’ll do the insurance.
When you have a claim, you don’t need to get a police report like you typically would get. With that tool, you can take all of the photograph, send immediately. It will hit us at the back end.
We process. We send you an estimate of repairs. So inside of that tool, there are even prices of all of those items in the market already input and updated monthly, either upgraded or downgraded based on current market price.
So it will do an adjustment, send you an offer immediately, and then we’ll credit your account, that is what technology can do.
