Tracking money in India is often a monthly headache. One app for bank balances, another for mutual funds, a separate portal for insurance and spreadsheets for everything else. That fragmented experience may soon change. India's market regulator SEBI is discussing a plan that could give investors a single monthly snapshot of all their savings and investments.
According to Business Standard, BFSI customers may soon get a unified statement showing their financial life in one place. Instead of separately checking banks, mutual funds, demat accounts, and insurance policies, investors may get one consolidated view every month.
The proposal seeks to expand the existing Consolidated Account Statement, or CAS. Already, CAS today provides mutual fund and equity investors a consolidated view of holdings and transactions across schemes and depository securities linked to a single PAN. The retirement savings under the National Pension System (NPS) have also been brought into this fold.
SEBI has started consultation with other main regulators including the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI). The aim is to expand CAS disclosures to cover more financial products like small savings schemes, bond holdings and provident fund accounts.
If implemented in full, this would be a see change in the way Indians monitor their wealth. For the first time, different asset classes regulated by different regulators could show up on a single statement.
The framework could eventually help an individual build a monthly personal balance sheet, according to a senior official to Business Standard. This can be somewhat like how listed companies report assets and liabilities every quarter, an individual can then see both sides of his or her finances in one snapshot.
Over time, it may also be possible to include outstanding loans from regulated entities. This would mean that one knows, besides how much they own, how much they owe-a truer view of net worth.
From a technology point of view, it is doable if regulators agree to share the data through application programming interfaces, or APIs. If data pertaining to various regulators is linked to PAN details, then depositories such as NSDL and CDSL can reflect it in the statement.
Much of the infrastructure for this already exists, say industry experts, as investors can already view their securities holdings through NSDL and CDSL, while NPS data has also been integrated. Insurance, EPFO and bank account data remain outside the CAS framework.
