The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Veritas Kapital Assurance Plc, Dr Adaobi Nwakuche, has projected that the company’s financial performance for 2024 would be a major improvement on its half-year report.
Nwakuche made this projection during a press briefing held at its headquarters in Lagos recently.
In its financial report for the half-year filed with the Nigerian Exchange Limited, Veritas Kapital recorded a 630 per cent growth in profit after tax from N672.4m in H1 2023 to N4.91bn in H1 2024.
The net insurance and investment results grew by 425 per cent, leaping from N1.243bn in the same period last year to N6.523bn in 2024.
Insurance revenue also experienced a significant boost, increasing by 350 per cent from N2.20bn in 2023 to N9.91bn in 2024.
The Gross Written Premium also recorded a triple-digit growth of 330 per cent improvement, rising from N2.92bn to N12.57bn in 2024.
On the results, Nwakuchue said, “Yes, the results looked like magic. I am happy that you interrogated those figures and found that they were true. You were not the only one. Some other people interrogated the figures and asked, ‘How does a company do this?’ This result was a result of the strategies we have implemented and in the coming quarters, there may be even more magic. This current quarter may be more magical.”
Highlighting the drivers behind the firm’s impressive performance, the CEO said, “We have developed a few strategies that would move the company from where it is or where it was to where it is and from our H1 report, you can see that we are deliberate about where we want to be. Some of those strategies are already paying off. You can see it in the numbers.
“One of the strategies is to grow our market share. We want to increase premiums and grow our market share. We know we are already doing that, and we still have a few months to get to the end of the year. We want to do much more than we have done in H1.
Secondly, we are a customer-centric company. We take our customers seriously. It is one of the strategies that has brought us to where we are currently. So our processes and our turnaround time have been fine-tuned to suit our customers, brokers and other stakeholders in the industry.”
He added that the firm was aiming to grow its gross written premium and hence its retail platform.
“In the last quarter of the year, we are going to make our retail platform very robust and enhance our brand visibility. We are also upgrading our technology infrastructure to be able to provide better services,” he stated.
Nwakuchue added that the firm was targeting becoming a market leader in the insurance space, saying, “We want to be the Nigerian market leader. We want to carve a niche for ourselves in the different areas of business; aviation, oil and gas, special risks and, of course, motoring and other lines of business. We want to grow productivity from what we are currently doing to being one of the leaders. We are looking at coming into the top five by the end of 2025.”
The Executive Director of Operations, Sunkanmi Adekeye, asserted, “We have nine different lines of business and all of these businesses are contributing to the business but when you ask for the specific business driving our growth, we can only speak to all of them. If you compare our half-year 2023 with half-year 2024, you will see that for each line of businesses, we have witnessed tremendous growth.”
Adekeye added that the company had already started working towards recapitalisation long before it became a topical issue in the industry.
“The good thing for us is that long before the sector started talking about raising capital, we have been putting funds aside for the eventual utilisation of increasing our capital level. So independent of the news in the sector, as an organisation, we have taken steps. We do not have any fear of whatever level of capital will come when the Insurance Reform Bill is signed into law,” he concluded.