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For years, Nigeria’s insurance industry has struggled to expand at a pace commensurate with the size of the economy, remaining one of the smallest contributors to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
NBS data analysed by Nairametrics on the finance and insurance sector show that financial institutions (banking) continue to dominate activity, accounting for 87.22% of total output in the second quarter of 2026, while the insurance subsector trailed with a contribution of just 12.78%.
In real terms, the finance and insurance sector contributed 3.37% to GDP in Q2 2026, with the insurance subsector contributing less than 1%.
The sector had earlier posted a real GDP contribution of 2.56% in the fourth quarter of 2025, marking a modest improvement of 0.10 percentage points over the 2.46% recorded in the same period of 2024.
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Taken together, the figures suggest that despite Nigeria’s large population, the insurance sector remains largely underpenetrated, with significant room for growth yet to be explored.
And while operators in the industry have raised a combined sum of N700 billion through the recently concluded recapitalisation exercise to bolster their capacity, there is still one big problem the money cannot fix: Trust.
In this exclusive interview with Nairametrics, the Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of Consolidated Hallmark Insurance (C.H.I), Mary Adeyanju, discusses the challenges confronting the industry and what lies ahead.
Nairametrics: Your website says Consolidated Hallmark Insurance (C.H.I) is a leading general business insurance company determined to change the way Nigerians see insurance. How do Nigerians see insurance, and what changes is C.H.I bringing?
Mary Adeyanju: Nigerians see insurance not as a product that they need. Nigerians see insurance like a scare. But actually, insurance is the product that not just Nigerians, but everybody in the world needs.
But most times, especially in our clime, we’ve not been able to drive the value to them. One of the reasons, as an institution, we’ve made up our mind that we want to change the narrative. And some of the things we’re trying to do to change the narrative is to see how we can get Nigerians to like insurance products and services.
Mind you, insurance is a product that I tell people that you don’t feel until you have a claim. So, it is not sold. It is bought.
And I say that with all sense of responsibility, because if you keep on paying for your insurance premiums year in, year out, and you have not suffered any loss, you really cannot test the efficacy or the efficiency of what you have bought until you suffer a loss.
So, we’re trying to see how we can drive the value of insurance to the people, not just the corporates that are buying insurance because they necessarily need the insurances to protect their assets, but also the individuals, the SMEs, that even need it more, because the capacity to rebuild after a loss occurs, they are the ones that really don’t mean it. So, what are we doing? We’re looking at SME products, little products that we can sell that will get across to those people.
And we’re still doing something in the works, trying to come up with the products that people need and not the products that we want to sell, because that is a gap area that we are seeing in the industry, that most of the time people are not buying because we’re selling what we are offering.
But the big question is, what’s your offering? Is that what the people really need? We’re also looking at the channels of distribution, because one very serious way to get across to the Nigerian people is to create a channel with which you can reach the masses without necessarily going from one door to the other. And that takes me to partnerships.
So, we’re trying to see how we can create partnerships and then sell through the partnerships, embed products and all of that. And these partnerships could be super agents, with bank assurance partnerships. So, we’re looking at all of this, in tweaking products, looking at channels of distribution, using technology to get across to those people.
Nairametrics: What challenge do you face as an insurance company?
Mary Adeyanju: Challenges we face as an insurance company, not just C.H.I, but insurance companies in Nigeria. The number one is the trust issue, which everybody knows. A lot of people don’t trust insurance, or they think insurance is a fraud, and sadly so.
And the reason is that some people have actually had dealings with insurance companies, and their experiences were not that pleasant. And so they have formed an opinion. And that opinion, they have shared with other people.
And you know, bad news travels fast. But sometimes people don’t even take time to drill down to know how those claims, the experience or the journey, how it went, so that you can really know what happened and how it happened. So that has led to a lot of trust issues, and it’s also affecting what you see today in terms of our insurance growth and our contribution to the GDP of this country. So trust is a major issue for us.
Number two, another very major issue for us, which the recently concluded recapitalization exercise has addressed, is capacity. So, the market is going to be able to retain more businesses, and of course we should be able to see more growth.
Another issue we have is technology. As one sector, if you compare us in the financial services sector, insurance seems to be the last when it comes to the use of technology. So we’re also hoping that the capital we have raised is going to also help us to invest more in technology.
Because if we do that, we’re going to be able to reach out more to people and then change the face of the industry. So the issue of technology, the issue of trust, and people. So the industry too has not been able to attract also the right kind of people, because also within the financial services ecosystem, we are like the least paid as well.
Because if you pay more, you’re going to be able to also attract the best hand. So also these things are a chain of issues that we are all collectively dealing with. So it’s not peculiar to C.H.I alone.
Although for the purposes of this interview, yes, C.H.I. But I can tell you, it is a general problem.
Nairametrics: I have a personal experience around that trust issue. And that insurance company, not C.H.I, is still owing me till today. So I did a life insurance with them. I was paying monthly for five years. At maturity, I was supposed to get my money, but six years after, I have not gotten paid. So on the side of the insurance companies in Nigeria, what do you think they should do to bridge that trust gap?
Mary Adeyanju: I’m sorry about that. Let me apologize. There’s always that one bad egg. Unfortunately, you dealt with the wrong one. That is not to say that insurance companies don’t pay claims.
Honestly, I would say with every sense of responsibility, we pay claims, huge claims, and we will continue to pay claims because insurance companies are established to carry risk and pay claims where they crystallize.
Even the loss that you suffered from and has not been paid, there are avenues with which you can express yourself, and you will be treated. You can report to NIA, the Nigerian Insurance Association, it is a body that coordinates and governs the affairs of the insurance industry. It’s not a regulator, but we look at all of those issues.
NAICOM is also very up on customer protection. It’s one of the strategic key pillars of this NAICOM of today, and insurance companies have been made to contribute to that consumer protection fund, seriously from our premium, to ensure that consumers or customers are protected, as it were, both in terms of their premiums or whatever they’re doing with insurance companies.
Nairametrics: Following the completion of the recapitalization in the insurance sector, what do you foresee in the next few years?
Mary Adeyanju: Let’s take 3 years as long-term and one year as short-term. I see a situation where the industry should invest more in technology, because the truth of the matter is that every business of today, I tell my people, should be a technology business that is doing something.
It should be a technology business that is selling insurance. A technology business that is selling banking, or else you’re dead in one, two years. That’s the truth.
So I see an insurance industry that has raised capital and should be able to invest in technology, should be able to invest in people, and that will help us, to be properly optimized and efficient to be able to deliver better services to our clients. And all of these kind of complaints that you just talked about should be eroded. Technology will bring speed with claims.
Like in C.H.I today, we have a technology tool called Curacel, which we are using for our motor claims. So it’s helping us with pre and post, and it’s creating a lot of efficiency with our motor claims in terms of speed of paying claims and all of that. So these are some of the things.
So when you insure your motor vehicle, typically, we’re supposed to come, inspect the car, do all of that, and be sure that the vehicle is there. Now, with this tool, once you download, you do all of the inspection, send the report to us, we’ll do the insurance.
When you have a claim, you don’t need to get a police report like you typically would get. With that tool, you can take all of the photograph, send immediately. It will hit us at the back end.
We process. We send you an estimate of repairs. So inside of that tool, there are even prices of all of those items in the market already input and updated monthly, either upgraded or downgraded based on current market price.
So it will do an adjustment, send you an offer immediately, and then we’ll credit your account, that is what technology can do.
So what the capitalization will also do for us, it will help with people. We can employ the right people. It will help us to be operationally very efficient. It will help us with capacity.
And of course, it will ultimately also create more jobs for people, because if we’re doing more, then you also need more hands to be able to do the job. So on the flip side, job opportunities should be created, even with technology, but you still need people to be able to manage the technology infrastructure that you have. So these are some of the things that recapitalization will bring in the next one year, even very quickly, in another one year, we should begin to see some of these changes.
Nairametrics: Consolidated Hallmark Holdings Plc reported a profit before tax of N27.10 billion for the six months ended June 30, 2026, representing an increase of 1,436% from N1.76 billion recorded in the corresponding period of 2025. What is the secret behind this growth?
Mary Adeyanju: I would divide the growth into two parts. So we had fair value gains, growth from fair value from investments, or let me put it, from the capital market. So if you do a comparison between last year, or say 2025, and half-year 2026, because I can hear the numbers and you can see the jump and all of that.
I know that the same Nairametrics reported that we had growth from fair value. Yes, we did have growth from fair value. We still have operational profit there, but I can tell you that about 80% of it is a fair value gain from the capital market.
We were favored to have invested in some particular stocks that really went up and all that, which is good for us. Operationally, we’re also not running at a loss. So we still have operational profit, which we hope to build on more within now and the end of the year.
So what happened was the business got a bit stagnated about the era of the recapitalization period. A lot of clients were trimming their transactions and waiting to see which insurance company was going to recapitalize and all of that. So we’re going through what I call the recovery period.
We’re going to build up to operational profit because since we started this company, we’ve always had operational profits and we’ve always had fair value gains. So the business has never been unprofitable and it will continue to be. So we have two legs of profit there. That is why you see a sharp difference comparing 2025 and 2026.
Nairametrics: The company’s share price has also gained more than 60% in the last one year.
Mary Adeyanju: Well, it’s natural that it should happen, or I expected it for obvious reasons.
One, the recapitalization exercise generally for the industry has brought more of investors’ confidence into the insurance space. Of course, if you even look at the few insurance companies or the insurance companies that raise money, all of them were oversubscribed. They all raised money.
We didn’t raise, but it just tells me that people are getting more confident about the insurance business. And investors are saying, look, there’s money to be made here, so let me throw my money here because I will get a good return on my investment. So investors’ confidence.
Two, consumer confidence. I think another thing too is the value that the group, you know that in 2024, we metamorphosed into a group. This company started as just Consolidated Hallmark Insurance, but we have grown over time and gave birth to the finance house, gave birth to HMO, gave birth to a micro life insurance company which we have just recently sold, gave birth to just a year plus now, a life company as well.
And of course, with all of these companies in the group, we now grew to be a holding company. So the group structure also sends a lot of reassurance to investors to say, this is the right place to be because it creates a lot of value that comes with the group. So you can’t take away the group structure from it.
Nairametrics: Just a follow-up around the recapitalization, how easy was it for C.H.I to meet that capital requirement?
Mary Adeyanju: We didn’t raise any capital, we already had the money. The time we raised capital was when I was telling you before, 20 years ago, we didn’t need them. As at the time we were audited for recapitalization, that was, as at 31st of December, 2025, we had N32 billion, and of course we just needed N15 billion, you also know that we had just invested in a life company, because the life company is the subsidiary of the general, so we own 98.2% of the life company, so we had invested in a life company, fully, and that life company is also fully recapitalized, as at the time of capitalization, we had N10.2 billion, and they needed N10 billion, and we still had 32 billion, you know, and as at this end of half year 2026, you can see what the capital is, I don’t need to tell you, so we didn’t need to raise capital to the glory of God, we have the capital.
It’s really what to do with the capital, how to take advantage of the capital, so those are the things that we’re working very hard at, so that we can, you know, be able to attract the value that the capital comes with.
Nairametrics: A couple of weeks ago, NSIA Insurance announced that it has transferred its entire life insurance portfolio to your sister company, tell us about this deal.
Mary Adeyanju: These are some of the opportunities that come with exercises like this. Some companies would have to download because they don’t have the capacity to capitalise both companies. Some companies even have the capacities but probably want to throw all their muscle into their area of strength.
For whatever reason, an opportunity came up and our life company had to buy over their life portfolio because they want to focus on their general business. And that transaction has been concluded. We have gotten approval in principle from NAICOM. And that’s good for us. For a new life insurance company, it brought immediate value, clients, premium, these are some of the value you get when you have immediate capital to trade with.
