FAQs

The IEPFA Authority is entrusted with the responsibility of administration of the Investor Education Protection Fund (IEPF), making refunds of shares, unclaimed dividends, matured deposits/debentures etc. to investors, promoting awareness among investors, and protecting the interests of the investors. It was established on 7^th September, 2016 by the Government of India under the provisions of Section 125 of the Companies Act, 2013.

As per Section 124 (5) of Companies Act 2013 any dividend which is lying in unpaid dividend a/c of a company & it remains unpaid or unclaimed for 7 consecutive years, then such dividend had to be transferred to the IEPF. Also, as per Section 124 (6) of Companies Act 2013 all shares regarding which dividends have not been claimed for 7 or more consecutive years shall be transferred to the IEPF.

You need to file IEPF form 5 in order to claim your shares back from the Investor Education Protection Fund Authority. After filing IEPF form 5, you need to send following documents to the nodal officers of the company:

• Copy of acknowledgement
• Indemnity Bond (original) with claimant signature
• Advance Stamped receipt (original)
• Copy of Aadhaar Card & PAN Card
• Proof of entitlement
• Canceled Cheque leaf
• Copy of Passport, OCI and PIO card in case of foreigners and NRI
• Print out of duly filled claim form with claimant signature

People who had invested till early 2000s in securities, used to have physical documents for all their investments proofs. They used to hold equity share certificates, preference share certificates, debenture certificates, bonds, mutual funds etc. in physical form. Due to various reasons like change of address, settling outside India or passage of time, people have lost/misplaced their records of investments. Dividend warrants, redemption payment of debentures & preference shares etc. are often “lost” due to outdated or incomplete addresses. The cases of name change due to marriage, or other reasons or wrong names mentioned in share certificates, also the death of the original shareholder became the main reasons for unclaimed shares and dividends.

A corporate action is known as an event which is carried out by a company and it materially impacts its shareholders and other stakeholders of the company. Common corporate actions include the dividends (interim or annual), stock splits, Bonus issue, Right issue, and mergers and acquisitions.

These actions are directly related to you (as shareholders) as it affects your shareholding. Bonus and Split directly increases the number of shares you are holding and the dividends are the part of the earnings of the company which has been offered to shareholders by way of dividends to you.

Bonus Shares are shares distributed by a company to its current shareholders as fully paid shares free of charge in a predetermined ratio. For example, if a person holds 100 shares in a company which has announced bonus shares in the ratio of 2:1 then the shareholder of the company will receive 2 shares for every 1 share they are holding in the company. Hence the new holding will become 300.

The bonus shares become unclaimed when due to any reasons the shareholder could not receive the bonus shares. The reasons for this can be the change of address or lost in transit, or non-transfer of original shares in the name of the buyer.

The split of shares or stock split means the increase in the number of shares of the company. Split of shares is the result of the reduction in the face value of the shares but the market capitalization of the company remains the same. As the number of shares increases, price per share goes down. Company increases the number of its shares to boost the stock’s liquidity. Let’s understand this with an example, company ‘A’ announces a split in the ratio of 10:1, it means the face value of shares of company ‘A’ has been reduced to INR 1/- per share from INR 10/- per share. If a shareholder was holding 10 shares earlier in Company ‘A’ of face value INR 10/- then his holding will increase from 10 shares to 100 shares of face value INR 1/-.

Tracking & retrieving your unclaimed investments is what we do and we take pride in what we do. We have helped innumerable investors struggling to redeem their funds. We take care of the complete process of retrieving your unclaimed shares starting from tracking & finding your investment till getting your shares back into your DEMAT account. Following is a glimpse of how we operate

• Tracking of your shares and dividends and ascertaining the current valuation of your investments.
• We will even assist you tracking those shares as well related to which all the documents have been lost.
• We take care of all the communications with the company /RTA/IEPF Authority and any other intermediaries.
• We take care of all the processes and documentation except
  • FIR for loss of share certificates (Although FIR has to lodged by you, we will still assist you with the complete process
  • Succession certificate / legal heir certificate/letter of administration or Probate of will (taken care of by you although we will be there to assist you in all steps or you may delegate this assignment to us with an additional service change)
  • Surety if required for loss of share certificates
• Other than the above everything will be taken care of by us and the completed documents will be sent to you for your signatures.
• The IEPF claim process usually takes 3 to 4 months after filing and submission of required documents but some related issues may increase the timeline further by a few months. Matters such as transmission, transfer, name change, succession certificate takes time to complete. Although these matters may increase the timeline to retrieve your shares, getting your hard-earned investments is worth giving the required time.

We charge a very competitive fee. We work on a success fee model hence we don’t charge our fee in advance. We only take a nominal amount as client engagement fees (depending upon the process and valuation) the same is adjustable in the final bill. We will get paid only after you get your investments.

We are the only organization in India that has an exhaustive database and an experienced investigating team to assist the investors find their lost/unclaimed investment from various companies with just their name and address. We have helped innumerable investors struggling to redeem their funds, by searching investments worth multi crores. Even if you have lost all the documents related to the investments and even if you don’t have any idea about investments of your parents, just provide us the basic details about your parents like their complete name and all past & current addresses and rest will be taken care of by us.

We are doing our best to reach all those investors who have lost track of their investments. We try to locate them and after that we assist them in retrieving their investments. But this task is not that easy. Most of the investors have changed their addresses or unfortunately in some cases the original investor is no more and such reasons makes it difficult to locate the investors or their family. If you believe that your friends and relatives might have unclaimed shares just contact us and we will definitely assist them in retrieving their investments. Your efforts will ease our task of tracking investors on our own and it will be helpful for near and dear ones as well.

The signing of the Professional Service Agreement is the initial and necessary part of this process. This agreement defines our scope of work and our roles & responsibility. It helps us to represent you with various authorities while retrieving your shares for you. Signing this agreement will only give us power to perform tasks limited to retrieving your shares for you. Be assured that you and your investments are completely safe.