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Maduka Nweke
The Chief Executive Officer, International and New Markets at AXA, Benoit Claveranne, has said that the AXA Group was attracted to the Nigerian market because of its fundamentals, the market depth and other factors the company could leverage on to grow its spread.
Claveranne, in an exclusive interview with the press, said there could be challenges in the Nigerian market but the group believes that such challenges are not new as they are common to all emerging economies in the world.
According to him, “we believe in the fundamentals of the Nigerian market because it is a long-term business and not a short-term business and when you look at the fundamentals of the Nigerian economy, like a large population, strong GDP, strong growth in the middle class that requires more and more protection. Hence, if you want to be relevant in Africa, you need to have a presence in the largest country of the continent and that is why the company is collaborating with other stakeholders in the insurance market to improve insurance adoption or uptake of insurance products through public enlightenment as it is important that we enlighten the public.
“We believe it is the first market in Africa, and we are making sure we invest in the development of local technical capacity. We believe also that if we are able to focus on these two things, we stand a chance of benefiting from the opportunities we see in the market. You recall that about nine years ago, we started a public enlightenment campaign in Nigeria with a few players in the market. There is also an ongoing campaign that involves the whole market including NAICOM as it is clear that everyone recognises the fact that there is need for public enlightenment. We had this strong conviction that the emerging markets have the ability to leapfrog on many of the existing technologies that we have in the developed markets and if we know how to leverage them, we would go much faster and much further.
