Transacting made easier: Online, mobile services

Registrars and their client mutual funds provide a host of self management tools using online and mobile services.

These facilities have made it easy for investors to keep track of their accounts, maintain their portfolios of mutual funds and transact. Some of the important features of on-line and mobile facilities are discussed here.

Mailback Services for Investors: The leading registrars have provided a facility called Mailback Services to investors. Even without a PIN, investors can visit the Registrar's Website and place a request for a wide range of statements, which would be mailed back within minutes to the e-mail ID registered in the investor records. The only prerequisite is that investors should have registered their e-mail id in their folios.

The variety of statements available includes:

Portfolio Valuation Statement: This gives a snapshot view of your portfolio and contains balances by security, cost value, market value, period of holding and return on investment.

This statement is refined so as to give the portfolio both fund-wise and investor-wise and even give the investor a summary of the asset allocation.

Consolidated Account Statement (consolidated across Registrars): This statement consolidates folios and transactions across mutual funds handled by different Registrars and presents a one-view transaction account statement for investors.

Regular Account Statement: This is the regular account statement for investor folios.

Active Statement : This unique electronic statement from CAMS consolidates financial information across folios, with snap shots and drill downs. It allows investors to interact with the registrar, update information and request services, all from within the statement.

Consolidated Realised Gains Statement: This statement gives the capital gains and dividend details for the current and previous financial years, consolidated across funds serviced by the registrar.

Single Folio Transaction Details: This would give investors the transaction details in a folio in an excel format.

This popular mailback service is available free of cost to investors.

NAV Subscription Facility: Investors can view the daily NAV at the AMFI website. Mutual fund websites also allow for subscriptions of NAV. In this case, one will get the NAV of multitudes of schemes.

Registrars allow investors to subscribe only for the NAV of the schemes of the investor choice.

Mobile phone transaction : One of the recent innovations is the facility to transact through a mobile phone.

To enable this option, an investor has to register his mobile number with the AMC, install the related software available on the Website of the AMC offering this facility and then start transacting.

Other facilities : In addition to the facilities mentioned above, mutual funds and registrars offer several facilities which include the facility to check the status of a recent transaction online and the facility to receive SMS alerts for financial transactions and non-financial updates in the folio.

To use all these facilities, it is important that investors register their email id and contact details in their folios.

(Contributed by Investor Education Team of CAMS.)

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