SEC berates investor attitudes toward e-dividend registration

 

THE Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has decried recent attitude of investors towards e-dividend registration.
Speaking at the Capital Market Committee (CMC) press briefing in Lagos, the Director General of SEC, Mounir Gwarzo said the registration for the e-dividend has drastically dropped.
According to him, our intention is to migrate large chunk of investors into e-dividend platform to be able to reduce unclaimed dividend in the system.
He said there is no going back on the Commission decision to stop dividend warrant by December 31, 2017.
“We realised there is a slow pace in terms of implementation of e-dividend. This is an initiative that is very close to our heart and at the last count, there are about 2.1 million Nigerians who have key into. But in the last three or four months, there has not been appreciable increase in terms of number of enrollment, that is where we felt there is a need for us to have a conversation with the registrars and bankers.”
He stated that by December 31, any Nigerian that has not register for e-dividend will now have to pay N150 for registration.
Giving the analysis of enrollment in the last three months, the Head, Vertical Markets Group, Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS), Mr Samuel Oluyemi, explained that a total of 50,819, 59,204 and 37,153 e-dividend mandate registration were recorded in August, September and October respectively.
He stated that the drop in the e-dividend called for collaboration among key stakeholders with a view to driving SEC awareness campaign initiative.
Oluyemi stated that NIBSS dedication to the initiative was irreversible, adding that, 136 stockbrokers had been connected to the portal as well as 16 registrars.
He said, “What we have done with e-dividend portal is to ascribe each quoted companies to their registrars. When investors pick a form, the companies managed by those registrars are listed under them.
“The beauty of what we have put in place now is to ensure that stockbrokers begin to play a critical role in the e-dividend mandate registration of investors’’.