India to Launch Digital Platform for Unclaimed Shares and Dividends

New Delhi: The government is planning to alter the way old, unclaimed shares and dividends are transferred to investors or their heirs by moving to a digitally authenticated, consent-based and mostly paperless system from the current time-consuming and document-driven process, people familiar with the matter said. It's working on a new digital platform to connect the Investor Education and Protection Fund Authority (IEPFA) with the MCA21 portal for corporate filings, depositories, registrars and transfer agents, banks, payment systems, DigiLocker, Aadhaar authentication and other official platforms through application programming interfaces (APIs). Artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics will be deployed for various tasks, the people said. The IEPFA, which works under the corporate affairs ministry, oversees such transfers by relevant companies. The new system will save investors from having to produce information or documents already available with various public or regulated institutions and automatically fetch verified inputs - strictly with the claimant's consent - from these digital sources, they said. The new portal would offer a single interface covering the entire spectrum of claim submission, document verification, status check, deficiency resolution, clearance and payment. Through the portal, the corporate affairs ministry also aims to adopt differentiated processing based on risk. This means simple, low-value claims with complete digital verification could be processed faster while more complex cases would undergo detailed scrutiny. It would boost transfers without undermining fraud prevention mechanisms.