E-dividend in Nigeria: Investors urged to access portal through SEC website

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Investors have been urged to access the e-dividend portal through the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Director General of the SEC, Dr Emomotimi Agama who stated this in an interview recently, emphasised that the process is safe and urged investors to take advantage of the opportunity to mandate their accounts.

The DG said, “If you access that portal from the SEC website, it is genuine. The only other website that is genuine that it can be accessed from is the Nigerian Interbank Settlement System website because that platform was built in conjunction with NIBSS.This is very important knowing fully well the cyber security threats that exist in this space.

“You cannot run away from the fact that a lot of people might be trying to clone the website like they do for other institutions. But my guide is simply go to the SEC website www.sec.gov.ng which is fully protected and access it”.

Agama stated that requesting for Bank Verification Number on the portal is not out of place because for now, it is the most authentic retrieval of information in the financial space.

“We need to verify that you are who you say you are. If the BVN provided does not match your identity, it means it’s not yours. As an institution, we try to protect the investor and protect ourselves too as regulators.We will try to make it as easy as possible and also as protected as possible.

He said the issue of unclaimed dividends to the SEC is a very important topic because it speaks to the investors themselves.

The SEC boss said the reason why investors come to the market is to have returns and when the return is not getting to them it becomes a challenge and the SEC is very serious about it.

He said, “Very recently the Senate Committee on Capital Market had a hearing on the matter and we were there fully. For us at the SEC, we believe that we can deal with it, and that has taken us into rejiging the entire process.

Agama said the SEC and the Committee for Identity Management for the Capital Market looked at the entire spectrum of the unclaimed dividends issue and identified that the major issue is lack of identification of investors.

He said that alone brings to the fore that technology will be a solution adding that the Commission is looking at the full hog of the entire process trying to make sure that people are identified because one of the reasons why dividends are not paid to people is because of their account numbers and other missing details that are required by the companies to be able to do that.

“The SEC is in the fore front of making sure that the unclaimed dividends are reduced and at the end of the day completely erased. For the SEC, we will employ every means that will cause people to understand the processes around claiming dividends, around identification and making sure people understand what they need to do to get their dividends back. For us any effort to reduce these unclaimed dividends will be a positive one for us,” Agama added.

Unclaimed dividends are dividends that have not been paid to investors.

The Commission had announced the launch of the revamped e-Dividend Mandate Management System (e-DMMS) portal as a bold step to curb the growth of unclaimed dividends and generally improve investor experience in the Nigerian capital market.

According to the Commission, “the revamped e-DMMS Portal introduces a “self-service interface” that allows investors apply to mandate their accounts for e-dividend virtually, without having to visit a registrar or a bank.”

It advised investors whose shareholding accounts appear on the list of non-mandated accounts hosted on the Commission’s website to use the new self-service portal by clicking on the “NIBSS Self Service” link.