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Afrinvest Securities Limited, a licenced broker dealer and subsidiary of Afrinvest (West Africa) Limited, has launched a new platform to help investors track and unlock all outstanding and unclaimed dividends from quoted companies in Nigeria, according to a statement released on Friday. The company said a lot of investors have neither dematerialized their share certificates nor gotten their portion of dividends declared by their investee companies.

The platform, called Afritrack, will ensure reconciliation of clients’ investments; recovery and dematerialization of all share certificates; recovery of all outstanding bonuses and dividend warrants; revalidation of expired dividend warrants; consolidation of multiple shareholding and Central Securities Clearing Service (CSCS) accounts; among other things.

“Afritrack is designed to assist you cut through the complexities of reconciling your portfolio, thus putting you back in charge of your investments,” the company said. “We intend to leverage on our cordial relationships with various company registrars to promptly reconcile actual shareholding against benefits and entitlements received.”

According to the Companies and Allied Matters Act, unclaimed dividends are dividends not claimed within six months after a declaration, and are returned to the company from where the investors can make claims up until, but not later than, 12 years. The value of unclaimed dividends in Nigeria has grown rapidly from N2 billion in 1999 to about N90 billion as of September 2015, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Afrinvest Securities Limited is a dealing member of the Nigerian Stock Exchange and is regulated by SEC as a broker-dealer. The company was spun off in 2012 when the stockbroking business of Afrinvest (West Africa) Limited was transferred into a separate subsidiary.