As of now, brokerages offer trading and demat account opening facilities to NRIs only as a single category and not linked to an NRE and NRO accounts but a single savings/current account.
While an NRE account is a bank account opened in India for an NRI to park his foreign earnings, an NRO account is to manage the income earned by him/ her in India.
NRE and NRO account holders can now open trading and demat accounts in five minutes through the platform www.hello.geojit.com, enhancing wider participation by the NRIs into the domestic stock markets.
said that to begin with, NRIs in the US and Canada will not be able to avail of this new offering as the securities markets regulations are different there.
“For the first time in the country, we have enabled online opening of trading and demat accounts for NRE and NRO categories of accountholders, entirely through CDSL. All that is required of a prospective participant is to have an Aadhaar-linked mobile number and a permanent account number (PAN),” Geojit added.
NRIs in any part of the world, barring the US and Canada, can now seamlessly open an account online and benefit from the India growth story, said Jones George, chief digital officer of Geojit.
The online account opening platform has been developed by group company Geojit Technologies, whose Executive Director Anil Kumar said they developed this facility as opening a trading and demat account offline takes several days whereas if all documents are in place, an online account can be opened in five minutes.
Now, for the first time, all NRIs can start investing the domesitc stock markets.
Geojit has been servicing the Indian diaspora for over two decades now and has an extensive presence in the GCC region via joint ventures and partnerships: Barjeel Geojit Financial Services UAE, BBK Geojit Securities in Kuwait and QBG Geojit Securities Oman are joint ventures and also has a business partnership with Bank of Bahrain and Kuwait.
As of September, Geojit has assets under custody and management to the tune of Rs 61,000 crore and has over 11 lakh active clients. Geojit has about Rs 6,000 crore of assets under management from NRI clients.
