CIMA Code claim settlement deadlines require an insurer covering motor civil liability to present a compensation offer to a bodily-injury victim within a set number of months after the accident, and to pay agreed sums within one month after a settlement is finalized. Miss these deadlines and the insurer automatically owes late-payment interest, set at 5% per month under Articles 233 and 236 of the CIMA Code. For insurers, brokers and fleet managers operating across the 14 CIMA member states, these are not soft targets: they are legal obligations with a direct financial cost attached.
What does the CIMA Code actually require for auto claim settlement deadlines?
The CIMA Code (Code des assurances, applicable across Bénin, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Centrafrique, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Mali, Niger, Sénégal, Tchad, Togo, Guinée Équatoriale and the Comores) governs how motor civil-liability insurers must handle bodily-injury claims.
The offer deadline (Article 231)
Under Article 231, an insurer must present a compensation offer to a bodily-injury victim once the victim's medical condition has stabilized ("consolidation"), and to the heirs of a deceased victim within a fixed period from the date of death, or shortly after receiving all required supporting documents.
The payment deadline (Article 236)
Once an offer is accepted, Article 236 requires payment within one month after the 15-day denunciation period set by Article 235 has expired. This payment obligation is automatic: the insurer does not need to wait for the victim to formally demand payment.
What can pause the clock (Article 247)
Article 247 provides that if the insurer is not notified of the accident within one month, the Article 231 offer deadline is suspended from the end of that month until notification is actually received. In practice, this means slow or missing claim notification, not just slow processing, is often the real source of delay.
What changed with the 2022 CIMA reform, effective since 1 August 2023?
Règlement n°004/CIMA/PCMA/PCE/2021, adopted on 9 February 2022 and applicable since 1 August 2023, tightened the Article 231 timeline considerably. According to legal commentary on the reform, the offer deadline for bodily-injury victims was cut from twelve months to six months from the accident, and the deadline for offers to the heirs of a deceased victim was cut from eight months to six months from death (or one month after the insurer receives all required documents, if that comes later).
| Deadline (Article 231) | Before the 2022 reform | Since 1 August 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Offer to a bodily-injury victim | 12 months from the accident | 6 months from the accident |
| Offer to heirs of a deceased victim | 8 months from death | 6 months from death |
A 2023 academic review in the Revue de l'ERSUMA describes the reform's intent plainly: it shortened the insurer's window while, in the same move, doubling the time victims have to assert their rights. The same review flags that terms such as "consolidation" and "long consolidation" remain undefined in the text, which leaves room for interpretation in practice. Insurers should treat the six-month figures as the direction set by the reform, and confirm exact current wording against the consolidated regulation text before relying on them for contractual or litigation purposes.
This was not an isolated move. A separate 2025 regulation, n°0002/CIMA/PCMA/PCE/2025, applicable since 1 August 2025, sharply shortened payment deadlines for life-insurance surrender values and death benefits and introduced a 2.5% monthly late-payment penalty for those contracts. That regulation concerns life and capitalisation contracts, not motor claims, but it signals a clear regulatory direction across the CIMA zone: shorter deadlines, and automatic financial consequences for missing them.
What penalties do insurers face for late or missing offers (Articles 233 and 236)?
Article 233 is explicit: when an offer is not made, or is made in violation of the Article 231 deadlines, the compensation amount automatically bears interest at 5% per month of delay. Article 236 applies the same 5% monthly rate to sums that were agreed but not paid within the required one-month window. In both cases, the interest is automatic and does not depend on the victim filing a separate claim for it.
Article 233 does allow this penalty to be reduced or cancelled where the delay results from circumstances not attributable to the insurer, such as a victim who fails to provide requested documents. This is one reason robust, well-documented claim files matter as much as speed: an insurer that can prove where a delay originated is in a stronger position than one that simply missed the clock.
Beyond individual claim penalties, CIMA has been publicly engaging insurers and regulators since 2025 to address slow claims settlement as a recurring, reputation-damaging problem across the zone. A related measure, reported to be in force since 11 April 2025, bans "assurance à crédit" (insurance sold on credit), requiring premium payment before a policy takes effect or renews, with the stated aim of supporting insurer solvency and, indirectly, faster claims payment. Given this comes from a single secondary source, insurers should verify the exact regulation number and its exceptions with their compliance teams.
How do these CIMA deadlines apply outside bodily-injury cases (property damage, fleet claims)?
This is where nuance matters for fleet managers and motor insurers, whose claim volume is dominated by property damage rather than bodily injury. Article 231's specific offer deadlines are built around bodily-injury and fatality cases; the article's own text excludes victims whose claim involves only property damage from these particular provisions. In other words, a straightforward vehicle-damage claim on a fleet policy is not automatically bound by the same six-month offer deadline that applies to a bodily-injury file.
That does not mean property-damage claims exist outside any timing discipline. Once a settlement amount is agreed, whether for a bodily-injury file or a property-damage file, Article 236's one-month payment deadline and its automatic 5% monthly late-interest penalty still apply. For property-only claims, the practical deadline pressure comes less from Article 231 itself and more from policy wording, general contract law, and the reputational cost of slow payment. Fleet managers negotiating service-level commitments with insurers should ask specifically how offer and payment timelines are defined for property-only claims, since the statutory language leaves more room for negotiation here than it does for bodily-injury cases.
Is Morocco subject to the CIMA Code, and what are ACAPS's own rules on fast, fair settlement?
Morocco is not a CIMA member state. Its insurance market is regulated separately by the ACAPS (Autorité de Contrôle des Assurances et de la Prévoyance Sociale), which operates its own supervisory framework rather than the CIMA Code's Article 231/233/236 regime.
ACAPS has nonetheless pushed in a similar direction. In January 2026, it issued circular letters reminding insurers of their auto-claim indemnification obligations, including how shared-liability payouts should be handled and how driving-licence exclusion clauses may or may not be applied against insured drivers. These circulars address fairness and consistency in claims handling, but they are not a direct equivalent to CIMA's fixed six-month statutory offer deadline. Insurers and brokers operating in both a CIMA country and Morocco should treat the two as parallel but distinct regimes, and avoid assuming that a compliance approach built for one automatically satisfies the other.
Why do insurers and brokers still struggle to meet these deadlines in practice?
The deadlines themselves are clear on paper. The obstacle is almost always process, not intent. A single motor claim typically requires an accident declaration, a police report or PV, an expert assessment, a garage quote, photos of the damage, and internal approval before an offer or payment can be finalized. When these pieces travel by phone calls, paper files and email attachments between four separate parties, insured, insurer or broker, expert and garage, delays compound quickly, and Article 247's notification-suspension rule shows how much can hinge on the very first step: getting the claim declared and logged without delay.
A widely cited 2017 example from Cameroon illustrates what coordinated process design can achieve. Under the "Indemnisation Directe de l'Assuré" (IDA) expertise convention, two-vehicle accidents with material damage under 500,000 FCFA could reportedly be settled in around 15 days when declaration and expert intervention were tightly coordinated, compared to one to two years without that coordination. This example is illustrative and dates from 2017, so its current applicability should be checked, but the underlying lesson holds: the legal deadline is fixed, and the only lever insurers actually control is how fast the file itself comes together.
How does digitalizing the claims journey help insurers reliably meet CIMA/ACAPS deadlines and avoid penalties?
Most delay in motor claims settlement is coordination delay: waiting for a garage quote, waiting for an expert to validate it, waiting for a signed report to move through internal approval. Digitalizing the claims workflow attacks that coordination gap directly, by connecting the insured, the broker or insurer, the expert and the garage on a single real-time file instead of four disconnected paper trails.
This is the model behind platforms such as YourSmartFlow, which digitalizes the full motor claims process for insurers and brokers in Africa. The insured declares a claim and tracks its progress by web, app or WhatsApp; the garage submits quotes, invoices and certified before/after photos; the expert validates the quote and report remotely; and the insurer or broker pilots the file to settlement, with the option to trigger settlement automatically via API as soon as the file is complete. Certified, geolocated, timestamped photo capture through its technology partner WeProov also gives experts a faster, more defensible basis for validating a claim without a physical visit, which directly shortens the path to an offer under Article 231 and to payment under Article 236.
YourSmartFlow reports having optimized more than 250,000 auto claims in 2025 across 50-plus insurer and broker clients in five African countries, with a typical go-live of four weeks, an estimated 10 to 15% reduction in claim burden, and first-year ROI. These figures come from the company and should be read as its own reported proof points rather than independently audited statistics, but they are consistent with the broader logic of the CIMA reform: the fastest way to respect a six-month offer deadline and a one-month payment deadline is to remove the manual handoffs that make files sit idle between the four parties who actually hold the information.
CIMA Code claim settlement deadlines were shortened specifically to restore trust between insurers and the people they cover, and that trust is won or lost file by file, not by policy statement. For insurers and brokers across Nigeria's, Ghana's and the CIMA zone's motor markets, the practical answer to "how do we consistently hit these deadlines" increasingly runs through digitalized, connected claims workflows rather than faster manual effort alone.
Frequently asked questions
How long does an insurer have to settle an auto claim in the CIMA zone?
For bodily-injury claims, Article 231 of the CIMA Code requires the insurer to present a compensation offer once the victim's condition has stabilized, with the 2022 reform reported to have shortened this window to six months from the accident. For a deceased victim, the offer must go to the heirs within a similarly shortened period from the date of death. Once an offer is accepted, Article 236 requires payment within one month after the 15-day denunciation period expires.
What happens if an insurer misses the legal deadline to present a compensation offer?
Under Article 233 of the CIMA Code, a late or missing offer automatically triggers interest on the compensation amount at 5% per month of delay. This penalty applies without the victim needing to file a separate claim for it. Article 233 does allow the penalty to be reduced or cancelled where the delay is due to circumstances not attributable to the insurer, such as missing documentation from the victim.
Do the new CIMA deadlines (6 months) also apply to vehicle property damage, or only to bodily injury?
Article 231's specific offer deadlines are built around bodily-injury and fatality cases, and the article excludes victims whose claim involves only property damage from these particular provisions. This means a straightforward vehicle-damage claim is not automatically bound by the same six-month offer deadline. Once a property-damage settlement is agreed, however, Article 236's one-month payment deadline and its 5% monthly late-interest penalty still apply.
Is Morocco subject to the CIMA Code and its settlement deadlines?
No. Morocco is not a CIMA member state, and its insurance market is regulated separately by ACAPS rather than by the CIMA Code. ACAPS has issued its own circulars, including guidance in January 2026 on shared-liability indemnification and driving-licence exclusion clauses, but these are not a direct equivalent to CIMA's fixed statutory offer deadlines. Insurers operating in both markets should treat the two frameworks as parallel but distinct.
How can an insurer or broker realistically meet these deadlines despite slow document collection (expert reports, police reports, garage quotes)?
Most delay comes from coordination gaps between the insured, the expert, the garage and the insurer or broker, rather than from the legal deadline itself being unreasonable. Reducing that gap generally means declaring claims faster, since Article 247 suspends the offer deadline until the insurer is actually notified, and centralizing quotes, photos and expert validation on one shared file instead of separate paper or email exchanges. Digitalized claims platforms are built specifically to close this coordination gap.
Are these deadlines and penalties actually enforced and monitored in practice?
CIMA has publicly engaged regulators, insurers and other stakeholders since 2025 to address slow claims settlement as a recurring problem across the zone, which suggests enforcement and monitoring have not been fully consistent in practice. A related measure reported to be in force since 11 April 2025 banning insurance sold on credit is aimed partly at supporting insurer solvency and, indirectly, faster claims payment. Insurers should confirm current enforcement practice with their national supervisory authority rather than assume uniform application across all CIMA member states.
