In March 2025, Mumbai (Maharashtra)-based market regulator, Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) announced that it has partnered with DigiLocker to address the issue of unclaimed assets in the securities markets.
- For this, SEBI issued a circular titled ‘Harnessing DigiLocker as a Digital Public Infrastructure for Reducing Unclaimed Assets in the Indian Securities Market’ in exercise of powers given under Section 11(1) of the SEBI Act, 1992, to protect the interests of investors in securities and to promote the development of, and to regulate the securities market.
Key Features of the Initiative:
i.Access to Securities Holdings: This initiative will enable the investors to store and access information on their demat and mutual fund (MF) holdings, Consolidated Account Statement (CAS) through DigiLocker, a key Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).
ii.Nomination Facility for Smooth Access: As per SEBI’s circular, users are now allowed to appoint data access nominees within the DigiLocker application.
- For instance, in the case of death of a user, these nominees will be granted read-only access to the DigiLocker account, which will ensure that important financial information is smoothly accessible to legal heirs.
iii.Automated Notification to Nominees: The circular mentioned that DigiLocker system will be notified about the user’s death by Know Your Customer (KYC) Registration Agencies (KRAs), following which the system will automatically notify about it to the data access nominees.
iv.Role of KRAs: KRAs have been mandated by SEBI to serve as the primary source for verifying and initiating notifications to data access nominees, ensuring seamless transition process.
Key Points:
i.As per SEBI, all Asset Management Companies (AMCs) and recognised depositories are required to register with DigiLocker as ‘Issuer’ which enable the user to access their holding statement, as of the date immediately preceding the date of accessing; transaction statements for the last 30 days of MF units and demat accounts.
ii.It is mandatory for KRAs to electronically share the details of all instances of demise of investors stored in their system with DigiLocker.
- The technical details of data to be shared and its modalities will be shared as per mutually agreed National e-Governance Division (NeGD), SEBI and KRA at regular intervals of time.
iii.As per the circular, the nominee of digilocker can initiate the process of transmission of deceased user’s financial assets by herself/himself, if he/ she is also the nominee of the account.
iv.Investors holding securities in physical mode can also avail the benefit outlined in SEB’s circular.
About DigiLocker:
i.It is an initiative of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), launched under the Digital India programme 2015.
ii.It is a digital document which enables the citizens of India by facilitating access to authentic digital documents such as Aadhaar, driving licence, birth and death certificates, bank account statements, among others in their digital document wallet.
iii.The storage space provided was 100 megabyte (MB) initially and was later increased to 1gigabytes (GB). The individual file size for upload cannot exceed 10 MB.
