Why ₹1-tn unclaimed wealth is still out of investors’ reach

Unclaimed assets include deposits, insurance payouts, mutual funds, dividends and shares

- Maulik M. [e-mail]

Millions of Indian investors are sitting on a hidden fortune—Rs 1 trillion in unclaimed bank deposits, insurance payouts, mutual funds, and dividends, plus 1.72 billion unclaimed shares as of August. Much ofit has gone untouched for years, scattered across agencies, with many unawareit exists or unsure how to claim it.

Now, the government is taking steps to change that. On 4 October, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman launched a nationwide campaign to help people trace and claim their unclaimed financial assets.

Over the past few months, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Investor Education and Protection Fund (IEPF) Authority have been conducting camps to update KYC (know your customer) details and provide assistance to claimants.

The challenge is not just the scale but the complexity. Unclaimed money lies scattered across banks, insurance schemes, mutual funds, small savings plans, and provident funds, forcing investors to navigate multiple channels to track and recover them.

To simplify this maze, the Supreme Court has recently accepted a public interest petition calling for a centralized, Aadhaar-linked, e-KYC portal to consolidate all financial assets held by individuals and their nominees across regulated entities.

A one-stop digital platform

Today, unclaimed assets have to be traced across separate entities. The RBI's Depositor Education and Awareness Fund (DEAF) is where banks transfer the money of their customers’ savings and current accounts that have had no transactions for 10 years, and deposits that have not been claimed even 10 years after their maturity.