Be Familiar with NRI Demat Accounts
The Mumbai Stock Exchange stands tall, and is scaling new heights (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Indian share market has been on a roll for the past 10 years. In the year 2001 the BSE Sensex stays on 3500 points and you can see it was around 19000. Simply it was a growth about 18% per year on a solid basis which benefits numerous investors and the NRIs, PIOs and OCIs were among them.
As a NRI (Non Resident Indian) who wish to invest and earn money, the Indian equity market is the right choice which cannot be simply ignored. And the first step toward that goal is to open your nri demat account and the nri share trading account.
When it comes for the NRI investing in the Indian share market, the NRIs who wish to invest in the shares, mutual funds, bonds and Initial Public Offers of Indian companies needs to open a NRI demat account in order to trade in the share market. This NRI Demat Account is used to maintain the shares as electronic balances in the account.
Below were the features of the nri demat account,
- Safe custody and account maintenance: Facilitates maintaining security balance in electronic form.
- De-materialization: Allows converting share certificates into electronic balances.
- Re-materialization: Allows converting the electronic balances of shares to physical form.
- Account transfers: Allows the delivery and receipt of electronic balances consequent to market / off-market trades.
- Pledge / hypothecation: Allows blocking securities balance of borrowers in favour of lenders for obtaining Loans / advances against shares.
- IPO: Allows faster and direct credit of security balances into DP account on allotment through IPO issue of companies.
- Disbursement of corporate benefits: Allows faster and direct credit of security balance into DP account on account of non-monetary corporate benefits such as bonus and rights issues.
- Security lending: Allows earning additional income on the dematerialized holdings by the way of securities lending.
If the NRIs already possessing a demat account before they acquiring the NRI status then the old demat account needs to be terminated.
The existing demat account, which holds shares that they purchased while they were a Indian resident, will have to be closed and the shares needs to be transferred to an NRO (Non-Resident Ordinary) demat account. They can continue holding these shares in the NRO demat account or sell them. If they wish to sell the shares on hold, the proceeds are credited to the NRO savings account and there are restrictions on repatriation. This simply means, they can repatriate up to USD 1 million per calendar year (including all other capital account remittances) but they will be required a certificate from their chartered accountant certifying the funds source.
They are not allowed to purchase any more shares from the secondary market in this account because of certain restrictions of the RBI. An NRI has certain restrictions when it comes to investing in Indian share market. For example, an NRI cannot invest more than 5% in the paid up capital of an Indian company. For tracking these restrictions RBI requires the NRIs to make these changes in the demat accounts that they opened before becoming an NRI.
However, the NRIs can purcha
se shares from the primary market through this NRO demat account. It means, they can buy shares issued through Initial Public Offers (IPOs), on repatriable basis, using funds in their NRI bank account.
Alyssa Jones is a guest blogger who interested in blogging about shares and stocks investing in the Indian market for the NRIs. To know more about NRI share trading please visit http://www.nrisharetradingaccount.com/
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Category: Investing
Unicon now offers a convenient and hassle-free way of Investing in the Indian Securities Market to NRIs who wish to participate in the Indian Growth story. We at Unicon, guide our NRI clients at every step of their investment needs so that they have complete peace of mind about their investments in India.