The Reserve Bank of India has announced the development of a new centralised web portal to search for unclaimed deposits that are older than ten years. Currently, bank customers have to go through websites of multiple banks to claim these deposits.
This action follows public sector banks' surrender to the RBI of unclaimed deposits valued at about Rs. 35,000 crore as of February 2023.. The RBI acted to address the issue of unclaimed money because these deposits hadn't been used for at least ten years.
The creation of a web portal to enable searching across various banks for potential unclaimed deposits has been decided upon in order to enhance and expand the access of depositors or beneficiaries. While announcing the first bi-monthly monetary policy for the current fiscal year 2023–2024, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das made the statement.
State Bank of India (SBI), Punjab National Bank, Canara Bank, and Bank of Baroda are in that order on the list of unclaimed deposits, which total Rs. 8,086 crore in total.
What are unclaimed accounts?: A deposit is deem,ed to be unclaimed in case there has been no activity on it for 10 years or longer, such as a deposit of funds or a withdrawal from the depositor. The growing number of unclaimed deposits are basically the result of depositors failing to close their current or SB accounts when they no longer want to use them or failing to notify banks of their desire to redeem matured fixed deposits. There are also casaaes of accounts belonging to deceased depositors when the nominees or legal heirs fail to lodge a claim against the bank or banks in question.
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