Business
ARIAN Urges Members To Deepen Insurance Penetration
President, Association of Registered Insurance Agents of Nigeria (ARIAN), Mr Gbadebo Olamerun, has urged insurance agents to leverage on the internet and social media to deepen insurance penetration in the country.
Olamerun spoke at the ongoing 7th Annual Conference and General Meeting of the association held last Thursday in Lagos.
The Tide source reports that the theme of the conference is ‘Achieving Financial Stability in Nigeria: Role of Insurance`.
The ARIAN boss said practitioners cannot do today’s job with yesterday’s strategies and still be in business tomorrow.
Olamerun said the dynamics of insurance business climate had changed.
“The internet and social media has gradually built itself a multi-billion naira organisation with skyscrapers and head office built in the cloud, without any physical office,’’ he said.
Olamerun said he knew a lady who got a whooping N70 million insurance premium in one transaction deal on Facebook.
“She has never met the man; we could imagine how many bus stops she needed to go through to meet the man if Facebook was a street in Lagos.
“In a nutshell, the business is changing and if we want to maintain our relevance in the industry, we must increase our appetite for knowledge, with taste for great ambition,’’ he said.
Olamerun urged ARIAN members to be reliable and relevant for insurance to grow in the country.
Speaking on his agenda for 2017, Oremerun said the association would build more strategic relationship with other arms of insurance to aid its activities in the industry.
“In the next 365 days, we would build more strategic relationship to aid our activities in insurance industry.
“To God be the Glory, we had been able increase our financials to enable us acquire our own secretariat.
“By the first quarter of 2017, we would launch the acquisition of ARIAN estate in Ikorodu and Ibeju Lekki parts of Lagos, which members can take advantage of.
“Likewise, a cooperative society to help support and grow the lines of insurance agent would be launched,’’ he said.
Cornerstone of Financial Services
A survey of more than 1 000 global finance leaders undertaken by digital payment network Ripple shows that 72% of respondents believe they need to offer a digital asset solution to remain competitive.
According to Ripple, leaders from the banking, fintech, corporate and asset management sector have made it clear that the “digital asset revolution is happening now”.
“Digital assets are quickly becoming a cornerstone of financial services, underpinned by progressive regulation, growing interest from Tier-1 banks, a steady consumer shift from banks to fintech providers, and booming stablecoin adoption,” Ripple says.
The survey was conducted in early 2026 and the findings released in March.
Stablecoin Boon or Bane?
Ripple has experienced significant success in the stablecoin sector since launching its Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin in 2024.
With a market cap of $1.56 billion, it is considered a major regulated player in the market.
No doubt the platform was pleased to learn through its own survey that financial leaders were most bullish about stablecoins.
Roughly three-quarters of respondents believed they could boost cash-flow efficiency and unlock trapped working capital.
Ripple noted that finance leaders were thinking about stablecoins as more than “just a new way to execute payments”; instead, they viewed them as effective tools for treasury management.
In March 2026, Ripple began testing a new trade finance model built around RLUSD in a bid to increase the speed of cross-border payments.
The pilot initiative, developed alongside supply chain finance company Unloq [https://unloq.com], is running on the XRP Ledger inside a testing framework developed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
The Asian city-state is one of the platform’s biggest growth markets.
The idea behind the project is to see whether stablecoin-based settlement can streamline trade finance, too often hampered by reliance on intermediaries and slow reconciliation.
The only potential drawback is that if the initiative takes off, the Ripple to USD price could be negatively affected.
Ripple has always championed its native XRP token as a bridge asset, the “middleman” in the process of a financial institution turning dollars in the US into pounds in the UK, for example.
Ripple converts dollars into XRP and then back into pounds.
If RLUSD can do exactly the same thing, questions will be asked about XRP’s relevance.
That is a bridge Ripple will have to cross if it gets to that point.
Tokenisation Partners
Another interesting finding from Ripple’s survey is that most banks and asset managers are seeking tokenisation partners to help execute their strategies.
Some 89% of respondents said digital asset storage and custody were top priority. “Token servicing/lifecycle management also ranks highly for banks at 82%, while asset managers place greater emphasis on primary distribution at 80%,” Ripple found.
The survey also revealed that just more than half of fintechs and financial institutions want an infrastructure provider that can offer a “one-stop-shop solution”. This rose to 71% among corporate financial leaders.
Ripple attributes this to institutions and firms wanting uncomplicated, cohesive systems.
Infrastructure Rules
In its final analysis, Ripple says companies across the board are looking for partners and solutions that are “secure, compliant, battle-tested and that enable growth and execution”.
“The message is clear: infrastructure decisions made today will shape competitive positioning tomorrow.”
No surprise that this is precisely where Ripple is placing much of its focus.