The Acting Director-general of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Ms Mary Uduk, has continued to urge Nigerians to embrace the E-dividend mandate; this time stating that doing so would engender liquidity in the capital market.
The SEC boss stated this yesterday in Enugu during an enlightenment programme themed Current Initiatives by SEC Nigeria to Enhance Investor Value.
According to Ms Uduk who was represented at the event by by SEC’s Head of Port Harcourt zonal office, Mr Obi Adindu, the SEC is is doing everything possible to migrate all shareholders to the E-dividend era.
“The essence of the E-Dividend Mandate Management System is to eradicate or reduce to the barest minimum the incidence of unclaimed dividend. Unclaimed dividend is an undesirable feature of the Nigerian capital market which denies investors/shareholders the gains of participating in the capital market. It denies the economy access to the huge amount of money which should have accrued to shareholders and would have gone into circulation to oil the wheel of the economy.” – Uduk
Speaking further, she said that the paper dividend warrant regime is fraught with lots of inadequacies, including administrative bottlenecks, “postal system inefficiency, change in investors’ addresses, poor fidelity and human fallibility in dividend payment processes, amongst others.”
The E-dividend mandate will solve all these problems by directly crediting investors’ bank accounts, she said.
She, therefore, used the occasion to implore the investing public to take advantage of the E-dividned mandate by registering, as well as informing others about its benefits so that they too can register for it.
“May I therefore implore you all to key into the E-Dividend registration exercise by visiting the nearest bank branch or registrar. In addition to migrating to the E–Dividend regime yourselves, kindly tell everybody you know to do same in their best interest.”
She also reiterated that SEC has put a number of measures in place all with the intent of making the Nigerian capital market more investor friendly.
Please what do I do when the registrar refuse to pay the declared dividends despite acknowledging the receipt of my e-dividend form since last year?