00:00The National Insurance Board of Trinidad and Tobago, NIBTT, is the statutory body responsible for administering the country's national insurance
00:09system, which provides Social Security benefits to insured persons and their dependents.
00:14On average, the NIB receives and processes approximately 40,000 claims annually. While most claims are completed with an established
00:26service standards, we acknowledge that this has not been the experience of all our customers.
00:31There are instances where processing times fall short of expectations, access to services may be constrained, and customers have expressed
00:43concerns regarding the timeliness of service delivery.
00:47They receive some 480,000 records each month from employers.
00:52These records currently require significant manual intervention for processing, validation, and correction of errors.
01:01The scale and complexity of this paper-based workload underscores the need for modernized processes and technology-enabled solutions.
01:11Enter the Empower portal. This makes interacting with the National Insurance Board simpler and faster.
01:18It allows companies to register their business online, employers and employees to get self-service options like online claim submissions
01:27and access to contribution statements and overall aims to reduce the time it takes to settle claims.
01:34Once you click Submit Chairman, that is actually replacing, that replaces what you do right now in the service center.
01:42So from a claim submission point of view, you will be using your portal.
01:46If you wish to get a contribution statement, you will go into your portal.
01:50The information will be available, so you will actually be, for the first time, you will have real-time information
01:56available to you to confirm that your employer has been paying contributions for you.
02:00That's just two of the many services that will be available, Chairman, from the insured portal.
02:07The portal also allows many services to be available 24 hours a day.
02:13That is, customers don't have to wait Monday to Friday 8 to 4 to conduct transactions.
02:19But at what cost?
02:20The cost paid to date to the vendor, and this is a cost as at February 2026, for the solution
02:27implementation of Empower, stands at TT 143 million plus VAT of 10.3 million,
02:36with annual maintenance costs of TT 50 million plus VAT of 3.5 million,
02:43and a recurring annual maintenance costs, Chairman, of approximately TT 18 million.
02:52Even as Phase 3 is underway, the employers' hub is open, and NIBTT has already onboarded some 1,400 employers.
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