Malawi’s leading financial institution company, NICO Group says it is targeting to dwell much on business growth in its next 5-year 2022-2026 strategic plan which is set to afford its clients to enjoy the Group’s best services.
At the company’s ‘Stakeholders Engagement Meeting’ on Monday at Ryalls Hotel in Blantyre, NICO Group Managing Director, Vizenge Kumwenda said 2021 marked the end of their 5-year strategy, which was rolled out in 2017.
NICO Group MD Vizenge Kumwenda
“Our focus within that period was to consolidate and strengthen our operations which would manifest itself by strong financial position besides good performance in terms of profit,” he said.
“Besides that, the consolidation also was aimed at enhancing capacity both in terms of people, systems, processes, procedures and so on. Overall, we are glad that we’ve achieved what we set up to achieve for the first 5 years which ended in 2021.
“Obviously, here and there, we have one or two things that we are still perfecting to ensure that we really where wanted to be.”
Kumwenda further said the company decided to conduct the meeting with the purpose of engaging the stakeholders in order to create a platform where the company can explain how it is performing and the outlook of where it is going.
It was also organised to give an opportunity to the stakeholders to ask questions and seek clarification on some of the things that they may have seen happening in the previous years, taking cognizance that the meeting was supposed to take place in 2020 but was cancelled due to the CoVID-19 outbreak — which also affected their services offered to the customers.
He also disclosed that apart from other achievements and good performance shown in 2021, it is also one of the years where they made a lot of costs in paying claims in life insurance business, saying CoVID-19, claims increased significantly with over 120%.
“Going forward in the next 5 years of our strategic plan, our main goal is growth in terms businesses by continuing offering services that are relevant, address the client needs and affordable as well as offered at the convenience of our customers.
“Another aspect of these 5 years is that, we really want to focus on the mass market where our services should go out there even in the rural areas where people are able to access our services and through that we will be achieving financial inclusion which will be very important for everyone,” he said.
Established in 1971, NICO is the pioneer in financial services in many regards as it was the first company to list on the Malawi Stock Exchange in 1996 and is the first Malawian multinational when it established NICO Zambia in 1997.
It is also the first to build a multipurpose shopping centre, Chichiri Mall, in 2000 and the first to list its subsidiary company, ICON Properties, on the Malawi Stock Exchange, after a 10-year period of no new listings in 2019.
The NICO Group’s strong presence in the country is through financial services that range from life & general insurance, pension administration, banking, asset & capital management; infrastructure development & property management; hospitality, technology — while enjoying some remarkable business footprints outside the country.
