NDIC receives commendation from US Office of Technical Assistance on capacity building

The Office of Technical Assistance (OTA) of the United States Department of Treasury has commended the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) on the establishment of a world-class academy that serves as a reference point for capacity building on deposit insurance system on the African continent.

Philip Morris, the regional adviser of the US Treasury, made the commendation in Abuja during a meeting between the NDIC management and delegates from the Office of Technical Assistance.

According to a statement from the NDIC, signed by Mohammed Kudu Ibrahim, its head of communication and public affairs, the meeting was convened to explore areas of collaboration towards the enhancement of training needs of the NDIC Academy.

The Corporation’s reputation in the international community has already been acknowledged by the International Association of Deposit Insurers (IADI), according to Morris, adding that several African countries now rely on the NDIC Academy for the capacity building of members of their staff.

Morris expressed his confidence that the OTA’s collaboration would further strengthen the Academy’s efforts towards achieving its vision of becoming the model deposit insurance training institute in Africa and the Asia regions by the year 2020.

In his remarks, Umaru Ibrahim, the NDIC managing director/chief executive, described the visit as a crucial step towards enhancing service delivery in the operations of the Corporation to address current challenges in the banking sector.

He expressed his optimism that the OTA would collaborate with the Corporation in the areas of contingency planning and simulation for bank crisis, including failure resolution strategies such as the purchase & assumption (P&A) and bridge bank options already explored by the Corporation.

Umaru lauded the current efforts of the OTA to contribute to the development of expertise on curriculum development, course design, delivery and evaluation for the NDIC Academy.

Before the current initiative, the NDIC had previously collaborated with the OTA on capacity building for the implementation of the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS); Risk Based Supervision (RBS), as well as Enterprise Risk Management (ERM).

Under the agreement, 200 members of staff of the Corporation, with eight already considered subject matter experts on the topic, were trained on the IFRS. A further 147 were trained on RBS while another 21 also benefitted from capacity building on ERM.