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In its recent circular, SEBI has said that the Mutual Fund Investment Tracing and Retrieval Assistant (MITRA) platform will become operational within the next 15 days. There will be first a beta launch of the platform for two months.
The MITRA platform has been developed by two Qualified RTAs (QRTAs), CAMS and KFintech to help investors claim their folios, which have been lost due to lack of KYC and reduce any fraudulent redemptions.
The regulator said that a lot of investments have become unclaimed due to death of the investors or investments made in physical form with basic KYC. Due to lack of availability of PAN, email ID or valid address, such investments do not show up in an investor’s consolidated account statement.
The MITRA platform will provide a searchable database of unclaimed MF folios which have become inactive due to no investor-initiated transaction for over 10 years. SEBI aims to encourage the investors to search for forgotten MF investments and update KYC as per the current norms.
SEBI has specified that the MITRA platform will have the cyber security and cyber resilience framework applicable to QRTAs who will also be responsible for compliance with regulations like system audit and cyber security audit.
The regulator has asked AMCs, QRTAs, RIAs, AMFI and MFDs to create awareness about this initiative amongst the investors. The new platform will be available through a link on the websites of MF Central, AMCs, RTAs and SEBI.
