Plans have been revealed by the Securities and Exchange Commission towards making the capital market attractive to all Nigerians.
This was contained in a statement by the Director-General, SEC, Lamido Yuguda, at a meeting with a team led by the British Deputy High Commissioner,Ben Llewellyn-Jones, in Abuja on Friday last week.
According to him, the commission is implementing various initiatives to ensure that products and offerings in the market are accessible to both the young and old which will further deepen the market.
Yuguda said, “The average age of that account holder was over 50, and that made us realise that the young people were not participating in this market and when young people are not participating in any market, that market is doomed to fail.
“And young people today prefer to do things on their phones; if you have to fill a stack of forms manually young people won’t do it. We want to make investing in the capital market a fun experience.”
According to him, the capital market experience starts with a bank account.
“So we decided to look at the whole process and find out what is turning young people off. We have started the process and seen how the tech companies are providing much-needed relief to the kind of bureaucracy that happens in the capital market,” he said.
Yuguda further disclosed that SEC recently approved an e-offer for MTN and expressed the excitement of the commission.
He added that the commission, in its drive to attract more people to the market, was focusing on a proper identity management system, which would also aid in the reduction of the issue of unclaimed dividends.
On his part, Llewellyn-Jones canvassed the need for SEC to create more alternative options for investments for all classes of people as one of the ways of pulling people away from unregulated space.
“The more you can create alternative options, the easier it is to pull people away from unregulated space and that is why the Sandbox is so attractive to us and why we encourage it,” he said.
