As part of its ongoing digitalization of registration processes for corporate entities in Nigeria, the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) has restated its commitment to ending delays in business registration processes and service delivery through new digital reforms.
The Registrar-General of the commission, Mr. Hussaini Ishaq-Magaji, gave this assurance on Monday at the CAC Stakeholders’ Forum held in Kano, which was attended lawyers, business owners, anti-graft agencies and other partners to review challenges and reforms in the commission’s service.
He recalled that commission inherited an overstretched registration portal that was unable to cope with the growing demands associated with compliance initiatives such as mandatory registration of Point-of-Sale (PoS) businesses and annual returns filing.
According to him, the ugly situation created a backlog of applications and placed an unfair burden on customers and staff.
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The Registrar-General clarified: “Our call centre and operational departments receive no fewer than 3,000 emails daily, with less than 100 staff attending to them. This model is not sustainable and not fair to our customers or our staff. That is why we resolved to change it for good.”
He told the stakeholders that the commission had in June this year launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered portal capable of reading and routing thousands of customer requests within seconds, thereby reducing the time for business name registration to less than 10 minutes.
Ishaq-Magaji maintained that with the technological feat, business owners or promoters can register business names and get their certificate instantly in less than 10 minutes from anywhere globally without knowing anyone in CAC or paying a middleman.
He, however, explained that other services, such as those relating to limited liability company and incorporated trustee registrations, were still not being done real time for now due to the backlog of about 7,000 pending applications.
But then, the Registrar-General assured stakeholders that further phases of the digital reform would close the gaps, based on the management’s recognition that technology remains key in the efforts to fulfil the commission’s statutory mandate.
In his remarks at the forum, Chairman of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Ungogo branch, Barrister Ahmed Abubakar, commended the CAC management for its digital reforms, describing the initiatives as a remarkable in the collective desire to fast-track business name registration in the country.
