Lamido Yuguda, the Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), spoke to journalists on what the commission is doing to sustain investors’ confidence. HELEN OJI was there.
What is SEC doing about rising unclaimed dividends?
The commission has done a lot to stem rising unclaimed dividends. For instance, we are working with the registrars to ensure that dividends are now distributed electronically through the bank accounts of investors rather than through dividend warrants which used to be the case.
The problem is that investors are not mandating their accounts; they need to provide account details to the registrars so that the registrars will pay the dividends to their accounts directly.
We observed that there are issues with that process. Unfortunately, you will still need to go to all the registrars that you deal with and give the same information.
Right now, what we are doing is to try and get one point of supplying that information because when you give it to one registrar you do not need to provide that information across all the other registrars and these registrars of course will automatically get your details.
The second thing we have done is enlightenment. People need to be enlightened, a lot of changes have been made in the market and the fact that many people have not mandated their accounts means that many people are unaware of this e-dividend management mandate system.
Also, many companies have changed…
