How to Check Your Demat Account Status

A Demat account is used to hold your securities safely and digitally. When you open a Demat account, you can store your securities like stocks and bonds in digital formats. Much like a bank account stores your money and issues regular bank account statements to monitor your transactions, a Demat account stores your securities, and you can monitor it by checking Demat account statements. 

The purpose of keeping track of your accounts is to know whether funds have been credited to your account in the case of bank accounts. However, in the case of a Demat account, the purpose of knowing its status would be to check if the securities bought were credited to your Demat account. Commonly, investors fail to check their status, but it is important to do so, especially as you can check this online. This article tells you how to check Demat account status. 

How are shares kept? 

In India, all securities that are traded are stored in electronic, dematerialised formats in two depositories - National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) and Central Depository Services Limited (CDSL). The NSDL and CDSL act as storehouses for shares. When you trade, NSDL and CDSL receive your shares through your depository participant (DP) or your brokerage, which represents intermediaries between investors and the stock exchanges. 

After you open a Demat account, you can open a trading account to partake in transactions on the stock markets. However, when you invest in stocks and other securities it is vital to check your Demat account status regularly to remain informed about your transactions. 

Why should you check your demat account status?

Once you open a Demat account and a linked trading account, you can start trading on the stock market. If you have bought securities like shares, they will be reflected in your Demat account. Typically, traders may simply assume that securities purchased have been credited to their Demat accounts by their brokers. Usually, after the settlement of trades, brokers transfer shares purchased by investors into their Demat accounts from a common pool. While this is done automatically in most cases, it is possible that shares do not get transferred into the Demat account. That is, they may remain in the broker’s common pool for a longer than necessary period as brokers use this to serve as a margin facility for other investors. 

By now, you may have a clue as to why checking your Demat account status is important. Just imagine, what if shares or securities have not been deposited in your Demat account? One of the main risks of this would be that your broker is using your shares to fulfil a delivery obligation towards another investor/client. This means that a broker is lending your shares to an unknown third party and you are ignorant of this.

Additionally, your broker may be using your shares/securities as collateral for margin requirements with a particular exchange. In the event of this, you are unnecessarily exposed to the risk of the sale of your shares by the exchange in case the market experiences a drastic downturn. In the worst of cases, your broker may lack the capacity to provide any additional margin to the exchange concerned in time. Finally, if you open a Demat account, make certain transactions, and fail to check the status, you potentially miss any corporate action advantages like the receipt of dividends from shares you may have bought but are held in your broker’s account. Instead, it is likely that your broker will receive the said benefits. Therefore, it is vital for you to check your Demat account status to remain informed about the securities you have bought. 

How to Check your Demat Account Status

Since you know the reasons why you must check your Demat account status, the next question that arises is “How to check Demat account status?”. Here, it is important to note that some depository participants provide investors and traders with Demat account statements of their holdings regularly. Such statements may be received periodically, either quarterly or monthly. Nonetheless, there are those depository participants and brokers that refrain from sending investors periodic Demat account statements. If this is the case, how do you check the status? Besides monitoring your share transactions, you may want to check other details including whether you are fulfilling certain requirements of maintaining your Demat account like the Demat account minimum balance. 

Investors who do not have Demat account holding statements from their DPs can check their Demat status by opting for online access to their Demat accounts. Depending on your broker/DP, accessing your Demat account online involves a convenient menu-driven stepwise process. Another way to track your Demat account status is to opt for SMS alerts. These alerts send you messages as soon as transactions occur, informing you about the debit and credit of shares, from or into your Demat account, respectively. NSDL and CDSL both offer such an SMS alert benefit, not to mention online access to your Demat account holdings. 

Where to check the Demat account status?

In the previous section of how to check your Demat account status, you may have an got some idea about where you can check your Demat account status as well. It is important to note here that, since its introduction in 2004, NSDL, particularly, provides traders an ‘internet-based Demat account statement’, the acronym for which is ‘IDeAS’. After you open a Demat account linked with NSDL, IDeAS gives you access to the transactions/balances in your Demat account. You can also benefit from online updates concerning your Demat account and this takes, at the maximum, just thirty minutes. Depository participants and investors can register for IDeAS. 

Besides registering for IDeAS, as mentioned earlier, your Demat status may be checked by logging into your depository participant’s/broker’s website and accessing your Demat account/trading account through a password/user ID. While some brokers and depository participants send you regular Demat statements in physical form or via email, Demat account status can be checked in other ways online as explained. 

How to Check Demat Account Balance

Despite its obvious utility for share market investors, a Demat account and ways to find out the Demat account balance may prove challenging. This is especially true for newcomers to the investment world. However, you should know that when you open a Demat account, you start your account with a ‘zero balance’. This essentially means that you hold no securities to begin with. Once you start your trading account and begin transacting in the share market (buying and selling securities), a balance will be reflected in your Demat account. 

First, let us be clear about what a Demat balance is. A Demat account balance is a complete overview of all the investments/securities held by an investor in a Demat account at any given time. This includes securities like shares, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, etc. As mentioned earlier, you can check your Demat account status, which will also let you check your Demat account balance, in a number of ways. These methods include checking your Demat account balance through the Demat account statements that your depository participant despatches, online checking of your Demat account status through your depository participant’s website by logging into your Demat/trading account, and through the NSDL or CDSL website by registering for the Demat access facility. 

Conclusion

Today, your Demat account paves the path to successful investing and the safe holding of your securities. When you open a Demat account, you can be assured of the protected custody of your securities in electronic format, as well as transparency in trading activity. However, as an investor, it is your responsibility to monitor your holdings regularly and make sure your investments are held in a safe way aligned with standard procedures in your Demat account. Currently, whether you have a Demat account that is linked with NSDL or CDSL, you can avail of the Consolidated Account Statement (CAS), a facility that includes all your Demat account transactions and your account balances.