The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Tuesday took the Investor Education Enlightenment Campaign on e-Dividend Registration to the ancient city of Kano with a view to mobilize the investing and the general public towards the value of e-Dividend Registration which is currently on-going in the country.
The Enlightenment exercise reached thousands of Kano people as they massively came out from their houses, shops and business places to digest the information being disseminated via fliers, stickers and interfacing with the audience in various languages which include Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo with radio campaigns.
e-Dividend is a service which allows an issuer to electronically pay cash dividend entitlements directly into the shareholders bank account.
Director General, Munir Gwarzo had recently said that the Commission aims to attract more retail investors into the Nigerian capital market in its determination to deepen and develop the market.
Gwarzo said that this is one of the reasons why the Commission has embarked on various initiatives line e-Dividend, Direct Cash Settlement, National Investors Protection Fund (NIPF) among others to attract retail investors to the Market.
We have pursued a lot of initiatives in the last year and we are pursuing more this year. We are taking it from a perspective that this market has never witnessed and the perspective is to address some of the lingering complaints of the investor. We believe that the retail investors are the owners of this market so our strategy should focus on them, He said.
As a country we have only less than 2% participation of retail investors in our market. Malaysia has 9%, South Africa 19%, USA 43%, and UK 13%. So our market is highly less being participated by the retail investors.
Due to the dominance of the foreign investors, anytime they move out of the market the market goes down. Our effort is to see that in the next 5-10 years we raise the level of involvement of the retail investor to at least 5%.
Gwarzo said the Commission has identified some of the challenges hindering the retail investor from accessing the market and believes tackling these challenges through the recent initiatives by the Commission would be very productive.
During the Kano campaign, the public were mobilized and informed that they could collect registration form the bank within the next 90 days after which a fee of N100 will be charged by banks for registration.
The campaign started from Airport Road through Murtala Muhammed Way, Bello Road, Ibrahim Taiwo, IBB Way k/Mazugal as well France Road.