By Chinwendu Obienyi

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has assured the investing community that the automated process of the Electronic Dividend Mandate Management System (E-DMMS) would be complete by the end of the third quarter (Q3) of 2022.

Its Director General, Lamido Yuguda, disclosed this recently in an interview made available to Daily Sun. Yuguda noted that the progress of the E-DMMS has been hampered because registrars are yet to upgrade their systems while adding that the automation of these processes will be done at the end of Q3 2022.

He said: “Yes, there have been challenges in the identity management initiative especially the manual and cumbersome E-DMMS process and the fact that some registrars don’t upgrade their systems to provide self-service function were also deliberated upon. It is hoped that the process will be automated by Q3 2022.

This has actually been ongoing over the last one year and we are expecting and working with NIBSS to ensure that by the end of Q3 2022, the automation of the EDMMS process would be completed.

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Yuguda explained that the commission was doing all it could to reduce unclaimed dividends in the country, while adding that the reason the number is increasing is because a lot of investors have not mandated their accounts.

“Dividends are now distributed electronically, so dividends go directly into the investors account and if everybody mandates their accounts there would be little unclaimed dividends in the system. SEC has invested a lot of resources, embarked on a number of programmes on investor education to ensure that people mandate their accounts.

This process is still open and can be done with the registrars, forms can be obtained from the banks too and it is a very simple process. We also have on our website a tool that assists the investors to determine any unclaimed dividends that they have.

I would encourage everyone to take advantage of these tools or to directly speak to the complaints section of SEC and we would guide that person appropriately”, the SEC boss said.