Statement by the Director of Technical Operations & Development
ALTAKAFUL Insurance Co. was established in 2007 and it underwent a total transformation into islamic takaful insurance as from the beginning of 2012 as it is considered to be the first of its kind to introduce takaful-based insurance in Libya after the February revolution of 2011. It was necessary to meet the market challenges upon us in terms of competition and complying with technical regulations, which needed the following:
• Defining Takaful-based insurance
• Training and capacity building of the technical team
• Improve performance across all company functions
First: Defining Takaful-based insurance:
The company took a great deal of effort to spread the culture of Islamic Sharia’a based insurance in the Libyan market, an insurance formula that was only introduced in Libya in 2011, due to previous political restrictions, despite being in application in other countries since the 1970s. in order for us to reach a wide audience in the Libyan market, we organized the first ever conference on Takaful Insurance in Libya in the well-known Dat’Elemad great hall in Tripoli, sponsored by the ministry of economy. High caliber speakers in the field were invited from different countries abroad and it was attended by many policy makers, business people and investors among others, over a couple of days. This event was extended to cover both Benghazi and Misrata, followed shortly by a number of meetings with banks, enterprises and companies to further explain our brand of insurance, an activity that we continue to do today.
Second: Training and capacity building of the technical team
It is without doubt that the elements of human resources’ competency and expertise in the field on insurance are the cornerstones of success and development. Therefore, our company took care of such elements and built its strategy on such expert human resources at the top of its structure, while focused on attracting and appointing top young, bright university graduates with good working knowledge of the English language. The company has populated its technical divisions with such caliber recruits and its fostered their technical training in the business, which has improved performance across technical divisions. The company also invested in English language training to all staff across all functions, and it aims to offer advanced studies in insurance leading to acknowledged certification for those interested, while expanding further in this direction as the overall situation in the country improves.
Third: Improve performance across all company functions
Our company has been adamant to improve performance across all divisions as they are closely connected and work in partnership to advance the success of the company. The main divisions of technical, financial and reinsurance were in the heart of such mission as we have invested in staff training and development while reviewed all our policies including our technical rules applicable in the processes of issuing and compensation, in order to improve our performance and limit the margin of error, which has led us to invest in an information system considered as one of the best applications used by insurance companies with staff training in its core. We are about to approve an further development on the system to allow connection between all branches and offices and agencies with our HQ. It will also allow some of our issuance and compensation operation to be done over mobile applications. As far as insurance products are concerned, our company is working towards offering even more Sharia’a-compliant services, such as family insurance, small enterprise financing and Haj and Umra.
We also seriously aim to create partnerships with Islamic banks to provide a legitimate insurance coverage to help achieve the aims of Islamic banking in supporting the national economy. In addition, we currently working on improving our marketing operations to gain further business and territory in all regions of Libya. In the area of reinsurance, we seconded an expert to reorganize the competent division as we took on a number of new recruits recently whom we aim to train accordingly to form a competent team in this division. Furthermore, as we continue to renew or deals with well-positioned reinsurers while we annually work on improving the terms of such deals and fulfill our end of the commitments by settling the bills of our reinsurers on regular basis to sustain our required coverage.
Financially, understanding the significance of securing our finances and controlling all of our operations, our financial division years ago appointed a number of qualified accountants whom we have trained and are satisfactorily performing to a good standard all areas of budgetary forecasts, financial lists and overall budgets, while providing regular reports as requested by management.
Finally, we forcefully aim to embed the concept of Islamic Takaful insurance in the country, not just in slogans, rather, in actual compliant application with the concepts it is built upon, allowing our clients to see the core differences between our Sharia’a compliant insurance and that of conventional commercial insurance that is widely inherent from the west.