Financial Services

With many competing firms offering a robust suite of product offerings and related services, the insurance market in Nigeria is vibrant and growing. Like many sectors across Africa, however, domestic insurers often lack the capacity to underwrite the majority of risks stemming from the main drivers of the economy. Nigeria’s primary revenue...

Given Nigeria’s large informal workforce – estimated by the IMF to contribute 50-65% of GDP – a significant segment of the population is not captured by the country’s pension scheme. Without some form of pension, this portion of the population becomes increasingly financially vulnerable with age. To combat this, Nigeria has taken steps to...

Nigeria’s National Insurance Commission (NAICOM) is advancing with its plan to transition from a compliance-based model of supervision to that of risk-based supervision (RBS) in 2017. According to the World Bank, RBS is a system in which the supervising authority allocates time and resources to firms based on the level of risk inherent to...

As is the case in most of Africa’s capital markets, trading activity in Nigeria tends to be dominated by institutions. Retail traders and investors once played a more active role in the country’s capital markets, but the market drop following the 2008 margin lending crisis affected participation from that grouping.

Nigeria was included in JPM organ’s Government Bond Index-Emerging Markets (GBI-EM) index series for local currency government bonds with effect from October 2012, with a 1.5% weighting, and was removed from it in September/October 2015. The inclusion followed the removal of the one-year lock-in period for foreign investors in government bonds...