The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has launched a new effort called the ‘100 Days 100 Pays’ campaign, which aims to facilitate the retrieval and settlement of the top 100 unclaimed deposits in every bank across the country within 100 days. This initiative is part of the RBI’s ongoing efforts to minimise the volume of unclaimed deposits in the banking system and return these funds to their rightful owners or claimants. The campaign will begin on June 1, 2023.
Unclaimed deposits include savings and current account balances that have been inactive for 10 years, as well as term deposits that have not been claimed within 10 years of maturity. To address this issue, banks transfer unclaimed funds to the RBI’s “Depositor Education and Awareness” (DEA) Fund. Through numerous programmes, the RBI has actively promoted public awareness, urging individuals to identify and approach the particular banks to retrieve their unclaimed deposits. Furthermore, the RBI has announced the creation of a centralised web portal that will allow the public to look for unclaimed deposits across numerous banks.
In keeping with the primary goal of protecting depositors’ interests, the RBI has implemented a number of steps to prevent newer deposits from becoming unclaimed and to ease the repatriation of existing unclaimed deposits to their respective owners or beneficiaries via proper procedures. Banks’ websites already offer lists of unclaimed deposits. However, the RBI intends to improve depositors’ and beneficiaries’ access to this information by building a web platform that allows users to search for potential unclaimed deposits across many banks. Artificial intelligence methods will be used to boost the search results even further.
The RBI’s ‘100 Days, 100 Pays’ campaign and centralised web platform are key advances towards increasing openness and efficiency in the recovery of unclaimed deposits. The RBI hopes that by streamlining the procedure and leveraging technology, individuals would be able to readily discover and reclaim their dormant cash, thereby improving depositor safety in the Indian banking sector.
