Over 1,000 DEMAT Accounts Opened during Lockdown

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Over 1,000 DEMAT Accounts Opened during Lockdown

While the stock market has remained closed for the last 69 days due to the lockdown, the number of people opening DEMAT account for share transactions has increased significantly. According to the CDS and Clearing (CDSC) Limited, 1,062 DEMAT accounts have been opened over the last two months. Suresh Neupane, spokesperson at CDSC said that shareholders have opened accounts to secure their shares at a time when uncertainty has prevailed in financial market.  According to him, the increase in the number of DEMAT accounts is also attributed to the continuation of services of merchant banks and depository participant (DP) offices. The number of DEMAT accounts has reached 1.66 million after the account was made mandatory four years ago when ASBA system was introduced for share transaction. Stock investors are required to mention their DEMAT accounts while applying for initial public offerings (IPOs) and doing share transactions in the secondary market.

As the capital market agencies are putting their efforts for the full digitization of share transactions from the next fiscal year, the increase number of DEMAT accounts show the attraction of stock investors in digital transaction. Damaru Ballav Ghimire, a stock investor, said that troubles related to archiving of paper share certificate has ended with the commencement of DEMAT account transaction. According to him, he has updated his all 350 share certificates in the account. “Now investors don’t have to get into queue anymore to archive their certificates and they don’t have to worry about losing the paper certificates,” he said. Ghimire said that many stock investors are yet to deposit their shares into their DEMAT accounts due to which they are not able to receive dividends on time. According to CDSC, 5.24 billion units of shares have been deposited into DEMAT accounts.

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