What is a Demat account and how to open one?
Posted by NriFinanceGuide on August 28, 2009
NRI Demat Account
Nowadays, investing in the stock market makes it necessary for you to have a demat account. With new IPO’s coming into the market, investors are gearing up to park their money in them. Earlier, a sheaf of papers made up the holdings. But with a demat account or a dematerialized account, all your shares are now in electronic form. In a paperless society, demat has been a great boon to investors in stocks as their holdings and prices and present values can easily be found out at the click of a mouse.
Demat accounts are easy to open at banks, brokerage houses and financial institutions. With so many available, options more and more people are getting a demat account done for investing in stocks to make money online from the comfort of their homes. When the broking houses open a demat account for you, they act a depository participants as they are a go-between the investor and the NSD or CDSL.
If you are an NRI – non resident Indian or a PIO – person of India origin and interested in trading in stocks or dematting physical shares, then the first thing you need to do is open a demat account with a DP or depository participant by filling out applications forms along with the required documents.
It is only after you get a demat account done in your name; you can open a trading account with the broker that you fix up. It is easy these days as all the major broking houses are online and it takes come research on the internet to get a good broker who charges reasonable commission on the transactions.
You can check out the client reviews or ask friends, co-workers or relatives if they are into stock trading for a reliable broker. Brokers are supposed to be the very medium for trading in stocks and the medium has to be reliable as you would have to trust him or her with your stock trading operations.
Your demat account is like an open book and record where all the transactions of shares that you have bought and sold get reflected. If you hold a share that was physical, it can also be dematerialized in electronic form. You don’t have to worry about shares you had bought earlier when demat wasn’t there. You can easily transform the paper stuff into electronic form and they would all reflect in your demat account.
After dematerialization of the physical shares, they would be transferred to your demat account. Your broker or depository participant provides regular account statements that show the balance in your demat account and the transactions that you have done during the period.
While choosing your DP, you should keep in mind the location as it should be preferably near you. The DP service that you look for should be conveniently located and the charges should be in conformity with that of the market. DP charges may differ among different institutions, but the charges would be the account opening fee, maintenance to be paid yearly, service tax and transaction fee.
Banks usually don’t charge the initial fees for account opening. It is better to opt for a bank where you already have a savings account. You can easily get the documentation and paper work done as the banker would be known to you.
You need to provide the filled out form with passport size snaps, copy of PAN card as an identity proof, passbook copy and proof of address that could be a ration card, voter’s ID or passport.
The agent will then take up the other formalities needed for getting your account opened and provide you with a unique account number for all transactions in stocks. You should collect the delivery slips that will debit your account and credit the broker’s account.
Get started, open a NRI demat account for all your demating needs today: www.NriDemat.com
Little me said
IT is very easy to open a demat account.. you can chek reliance money account and from there you can easily find out detils which i have done.. your article has been quite useful though .
Balakrishnan said
Hi,
I would like to open a Demat account. Already I have Saving Account with ICICI Bank ( NRI )India. Kindly Advice the details and Documents to be needed to open a demat account.
Thanks and regards
Balakrishnan.
Ashley Alfred said
“A Demat account is the account which a person has to open if he wants to trade in shares. Just as you have to open an account with a bank if you want to save your money, make cheque payments etc, you need to open a demat account if you want to buy or sell stocks. So it is just like a bank account where actual money is replaced by shares. You have to approach the DPs (remember, they are like bank branches), to open your demat account.
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Siddharth Pandey said
A Demat account is actually Dematerialised account. It has to be created when a person wants to deal in shares.
Visit: http://www.demat-account.com
b.k patel said
can i open demat account here with my son name he is in india. & can he operate from india .
Varan said
hello all after getting to know about various broking firms now am really confused and am here to take help from the seniors or experts who already made a milestone in stock market,I am looking for the best broking firm in terms of the brokerage charges, services and technical support.
Waiting for the reply and eagerly waiting to start trading in the market with the real money