The Assistant Director, (Inspectorate), National Insurance Commission, Dr. Sam Onyeka, has said the Organisation  is partnering with the  Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit to ensure full compliance with anti-money laundering laws in the insurance sector.

He said this during a sensitisation programme on, ‘Anti-money laundering and combat of financing of terrorism control measures for insurance companies,’ jointly organised by NAICOM and NFIU in Lagos on Thursday.

Onyeka said, “The idea is to sensitise the insurance companies on how to migrate to the new platform for reporting money laundering issues to the NFIU.

Basically, we have three types of reports, we report on suspicious transactions, cash/currency transaction report and foreign transaction report.”

Before now, he observed that the reporting system had not been uniform because while some firms were using IT platforms, others were using the hard copy versions for their reports.

He disclosed that what the commission plans to do now, is to synchronize the system so that every firm can be on the same platform.

To make this possible, he said the NFIU had to issue a guideline.

“This guideline explains how to use the IT platform established for this purpose. Our expectation is that companies should be able to report using the new IT platform by NFIU and it will also improve the level of compliance,” Onyeka said.

The Director, NFIU, Juliet Ibekaku, said the responsibility to take specific and timely action to prevent the financial system from reputation and legal risks rested mainly with the insurance companies in the first instance because of the nature of services and products that it offered to customers and because of the type of clientele it served.

“Some of the responsibilities of the insurance companies include identification of suspicious transactions and submission of all suspicious transactions to the NFIU in a prompt and timely manner in order to aid the combat of financial crimes, control the laundering of illicit money and prevent the use of the financial systems by terrorists,” she said.

Source: Punch (By Nike Poopola)