Zerodha’s online nomination feature can help resolve problem of unclaimed money: CEO Nithin Kamath

Zerodha founder Nithin Kamath (File image)

Zerodha’s founder and CEO Nithin Kamath says the recently launched online nomination feature by the broking platform may resolve the problem of unclaimed money lying in banks, mutual funds, Demats and other accounts.

“There's at least Rs 80,000 crores of unclaimed money across Banks, Mutual funds, Demats, & more. We are hoping this alert feature which notifies nominees when accounts become dormant & they don't reKYC, can help in solving this problem.” Kamath said in a tweet.

Zerodha has introduced online nominations where users can add single or multiple nominations to their trading and demat accounts. It will alert nominee(s) over email/SMS if the account becomes dormant after one whole year of inactivity and the user do not activate it by performing reKYC in time in response to the notifications sent by the platform.

There's at least Rs 80,000 crores of unclaimed money across Banks, Mutual funds, Demats, & more.

We are hoping this alert feature which notifies nominees when accounts become dormant & they don't reKYC, can help in solving this problem. Hopefully, the Banks & others follow. https://t.co/iYLHudbaLH — Nithin Kamath (@Nithin0dha) September 13, 2021

“This is to ensure that your nominee(s) are informed of the existence of your trading & demat account and the nomination in case of any unfortunate eventualities,” Zerodha stated in its blog post.

“Most people miss adding nominees to their demat account, partly because adding a nominee was an offline process. This leads to issues in the case of unforeseen events,” the broking company added.

It further quoted a survey stating that a corpus of over Rs 82,000 crore is lying in unclaimed deposits in India including Rs 26,497 crore in provident fund, Rs 18,381 crore in bank accounts and Rs 17,880 crore in Mutual Funds.

These are unclaimed, most likely because the nominees don’t know of the existence of these assets.