How to find unclaimed bank deposits and investments

The searches described below all take an identifier — a name plus a bank, a folio number, a policy number, a company name. Going into them cold, with nothing but a surname, produces either nothing or a list of near-matches you cannot resolve. Half an hour spent assembling identifiers first is worth more than a week of speculative searching.

Start with the income tax record, because it is the one place where institutions report on a person whether or not that person remembers them. The annual information statement and Form 26AS on the income tax portal show interest credited and tax deducted, institution by institution, for the years they cover. A bank that deducted tax on a fixed deposit appears there even if the depositor forgot the deposit existed. Dividend paid by a company appears there too, which is often the first hint that an old shareholding exists.

Then work through the physical evidence. Old passbooks and cheque books give account numbers. Share certificates, allotment letters and dividend warrant counterfoils give folio numbers and the name of the company as it stood then, which matters because companies rename and merge. Consolidated account statements from a depository, insurance premium receipts, and post office passbooks all carry the numbers that make a search precise rather than approximate.

Note the identity documents as well, and note the versions. UDGAM will accept a PAN, a driving licence, a voter identity card, a passport number or a date of birth alongside the name and the bank. An old account may have been opened against a document the person no longer uses, and searching against the identifier that was current at the time is more likely to match than searching against the one they carry today. Address details can substitute where none of those numbers is to hand.

If you are doing this as an heir rather than for yourself, keep several certified copies of the death certificate from the outset, and treat tracing and claiming as two separate exercises. Tracing needs almost nothing. Claiming on a deceased holder's asset needs the succession paperwork, which runs on its own timetable — our guide on closing a bank account after a death sets out the nomination and succession routes in detail, and there is no point starting that until you know what there is to claim.

Finally, write the list down as a table with a column for the register you have already searched. Four regulators, several institutions each and a family's worth of names is more than anyone holds in their head, and the commonest failure in this exercise is not a rejected claim but an unfinished search.

The banking side runs on two thresholds, and confusing them wastes a lot of effort. Under the Reserve Bank's revised instructions on inoperative accounts and unclaimed deposits, which took effect on 1 April 2024, a savings or current account with no customer-induced transaction for more than two years is classified as inoperative. A customer-induced transaction is broader than people assume: it includes non-financial activity such as a KYC update, a balance enquiry or a service request, not only withdrawals and transfers.

An inoperative account is still at the bank. The money has not moved anywhere. What has changed is that the account is flagged, debits are restricted until it is reactivated, and the bank is under an obligation to try to find you. The Reserve Bank requires an annual review of accounts inactive for more than a year, quarterly contact by letter, email or SMS where registered contact details exist, and — where those fail — approaches to the person who introduced the account or to the registered nominee.

The second threshold is ten years, and it is the one that moves the money. A savings or current balance not operated for ten years, or a term deposit not claimed within ten years of maturity, is an unclaimed deposit, and the bank transfers it with accrued interest to the Depositor Education and Awareness Fund maintained by the Reserve Bank under Section 26A of the Banking Regulation Act, 1949. The Fund's scheme sweeps in more than plain deposits: current and cash credit balances, margin money against a letter of credit or guarantee, security deposits, unpresented cheques and undelivered electronic transfers all go the same way.

Transfer to the Fund does not extinguish anything. The scheme is explicit that the depositor keeps the right to claim, that the bank remains obliged to pay, and that the bank then lodges its own claim with the Fund for refund of what it paid out. Interest runs from the date of transfer to the date of payment, at a rate the Reserve Bank fixes, and only where the underlying account was an interest-bearing one to begin with. A current account balance sitting in the Fund earns nothing, which is a reason to search sooner rather than later.

Two consumer protections are worth knowing before you walk into a branch. Banks cannot levy a penal charge for non-maintenance of minimum balance in an inoperative account — a position the Reserve Bank's master circular on customer service dates to May 2014 — and banks cannot charge for activating an inoperative account. If a branch quotes a reactivation fee or produces a bill for accumulated minimum-balance penalties on a dormant account, that is a conversation to have in writing with the bank's grievance officer, not a cost to accept.

There is also a public list you can search without any portal at all. Banks are required to display their unclaimed deposits on their own websites, updated monthly, showing the account holder's name and address and a reference number rather than the account number. For anyone who knows which bank held the money, that list is often faster than a centralised search, and it covers the same underlying data.

UDGAM — Unclaimed Deposits, Gateway to Access inforMation — is the Reserve Bank's centralised search across participating banks. Register on the portal with your name and mobile number; the registration exists so that the search is attributable, not because the RBI holds your money. As at the Reserve Bank's own FAQ, thirty banks participate, together accounting for around ninety per cent by value of the unclaimed deposits held in the DEA Fund, with more being added.

Search for an individual with three things: the account holder's name, the bank, and at least one identifier — PAN, driving licence, voter identity card, passport number or date of birth. For a non-individual, the equivalents are the entity's name, the bank, and an authorised signatory's name, PAN, corporate identity number or date of incorporation. Where none of those identifiers is available, address details can be used instead. Note that you must nominate the bank: UDGAM is a search across banks one at a time, not a single sweep of every bank in India, so a person who banked in three cities needs three searches.

What comes back, where there is a match, is the account holder's name, the bank, and a Unclaimed Deposit Reference Number. The UDRN is generated by the bank through its core banking system and assigned to each account or deposit transferred to the DEA Fund. It is deliberately opaque: it is designed so that neither the account holder nor the branch can be identified from the number by a third party. That is why the search result gives you a UDRN rather than an account number, and why the UDRN is the thing you quote when you go to the bank.

Understand what the portal will not do. The Reserve Bank states plainly that UDGAM facilitates only the search for unclaimed deposits across banks and provides information on each bank's claim and settlement process. The deposit itself can be claimed only from the bank concerned. There is no claim button, no RBI form, and no circumstance in which the Reserve Bank transfers money to an individual.

If UDGAM returns nothing, do not conclude the money is not there. The portal covers deposits already transferred to the DEA Fund, so an account that is inoperative but has not yet crossed ten years will not appear — it is still with the bank, and the bank is the place to ask. A bank outside the participating set will not appear either. In both cases the fallback is the bank's own website list and a written enquiry to the branch.

The Reserve Bank has also pushed banks to do the finding rather than waiting to be found. Its 100 Days 100 Pays campaign, announced on 12 May 2023 and starting that June, directed banks to trace and settle the top hundred unclaimed deposits of every bank in every district within a hundred days. If a branch tells you it has no process for unclaimed deposits, that campaign is a reasonable thing to name — every bank ran one.

Which process you are in depends on which threshold the account has crossed. If the account is merely inoperative, you are reactivating it, not claiming anything. Reactivation means completing fresh KYC to current customer due diligence standards. The Reserve Bank's instructions allow that to be done at any branch, including a non-home branch, or through video-based customer identification, and require the account to be activated within three working days of a complete application. There is no fee.

If the balance has gone to the DEA Fund, you are making a claim. Approach the branch with the UDRN if you have one, the identity and address documents that satisfy KYC, and whatever evidence of the account you hold — old passbook, statement, cheque leaf, deposit receipt. The bank verifies against its own records, pays you, and then recovers the same amount from the Fund. That second leg is the bank's problem, not yours, and a branch that says it cannot pay because the money is with the RBI has described the mechanism backwards.

Where the holder has died, the claim is a deceased-depositor settlement rather than an ordinary claim, and it runs on the nomination and succession rules rather than the unclaimed-deposits rules. Take the route from our guide on closing a bank account after a death: a registered nominee or an either-or-survivor mandate should get the money released on the death certificate and the bank's claim form, and only where there is neither, above the bank's own board-fixed threshold, does legal representation come into it. The fact that the balance sat in the DEA Fund does not add a court to the process.

Ask for a dated acknowledgement with a reference number every time you submit anything, and keep a log of visits, names and dates. Unclaimed-deposit claims are handled by staff who see few of them, and the commonest cause of delay is not refusal but a file that stops moving. A written record is what makes an escalation land.

The escalation ladder is short. First the bank's internal grievance machinery — every bank must have a board-approved customer grievance redressal policy and a nodal officer, under the Reserve Bank's master circular on customer service. If that fails, or thirty days pass with no reply, the Reserve Bank's Complaint Management System at cms.rbi.org.in takes complaints against banks, NBFCs and system participants under the Reserve Bank — Integrated Ombudsman Scheme. It is free, and it is designed for individuals without representation.

One practical note on documents. If the account was opened decades ago, the name on it may not match the name on your current identity documents — a married surname, a transliteration, an initial expanded. Take whatever bridges the two, such as a marriage certificate, a gazette notification of a name change or an affidavit, to the first meeting rather than discovering the mismatch at the counter.

The corporate side has a shorter clock and a harsher consequence. Under the Companies Act, 2013, a dividend that a company cannot pay goes into an unpaid dividend account under section 124, and money lying there unclaimed for seven years is transferred to the Investor Education and Protection Fund constituted under section 125. Crucially, it is not only the money. Where the dividend on a shareholding has been unclaimed for seven consecutive years, the shares themselves are transferred to the IEPF as well. People discover this when a demat statement shows a holding they did not sell.

This is the mechanism behind the largest single category of forgotten wealth in India: physical share certificates from the 1980s and 1990s, sitting in a cupboard, in a company that has since been renamed or merged, whose dividend warrants went to an address the family left long ago. The shares are not lost. They are held by the IEPF Authority and are reclaimable.

The claim is made on form IEPF-5. Before filing, approach the company — in practice its registrar and transfer agent — and obtain the entitlement letter that confirms what was transferred and when. Get the folio right at this stage; a claim filed against the wrong folio or a name that does not match the register is the most common reason a claim stalls. If the company has merged or changed its name, the registrar can trace the succession of the register.

File the IEPF-5 web form on the government portal, and note the service request number the acknowledgement generates — that is the tracking reference for everything afterwards. Then send the physical set to the company's nodal officer (IEPF) at its registered office: the original indemnity bond, a copy of the acknowledgement, the IEPF-5 form itself, and the documents the form lists, in an envelope marked as a claim for refund from the IEPF Authority. The IEPF Authority's own guidance describes the company sending its verification report to the Authority within fifteen days of receiving the claim.

The claim is a two-stage verification — the company checks the claimant against its register, then the Authority processes the refund — so a defect at the company's end has to be cured before anything reaches the Authority. Where the shareholder has died, the claimant is the legal heir or nominee and the succession documents are part of the pack, which is another reason to have the estate paperwork settled before filing rather than during.

Do not treat this as a bank-style claim. There is no branch to visit, no counter to lean on, and correspondence runs through the company's nodal officer. The compensating advantage is that everything is trackable by the service request number, and that the register the claim is checked against is the company's own, which is far more reliable than a memory of what was bought thirty years ago.

Mutual fund units do not go to the IEPF and they do not go to the DEA Fund. They stay with the fund, in a folio that becomes inactive, and until recently there was no way to search across fund houses for a folio you had forgotten. That is what SEBI addressed in February 2025, directing the creation of MITRA — the Mutual Fund Investment Tracing and Retrieval Assistant — as a service platform for investors to trace inactive and unclaimed mutual fund folios.

The gap MITRA fills is a real one. A folio opened for a single tax-saving purchase, with an address and a bank mandate long since abandoned, is invisible to the investor and to the heirs, because nothing arrives to remind anyone that it exists. Statements bounce, redemption proceeds fail, and the units sit there compounding quietly under a name nobody is checking.

That invisibility is also why dormant folios matter beyond the money in them. A folio with stale contact details and no nomination is the easiest kind of holding to attack, because a fraudulent redemption or transfer request will not trigger a phone call to a number anyone still answers. Tracing a folio and then updating its KYC, bank mandate, contact details and nomination is one action, not two, and the second half is the part that protects it.

For securities held in demat form, the equivalent housekeeping is the consolidated account statement, which lists holdings across depositories against a PAN, and the depository participant's records. Where a demat account itself has gone dormant, the participant is the point of contact. Where the holder has died, the process is transmission rather than claim — our guide to opening a demat account and the death-of-a-holder guide both set out how a transmission request runs through the depository participant.

SEBI's investor education site is the reference point for the surrounding rules on nomination, transmission and account maintenance, and it carries a toll-free investor helpline on 1800 266 7575. Where a fund house or an intermediary will not act, SEBI's SCORES complaints system is the escalation, and it costs nothing.

One habit prevents most of this. Once a year, run a consolidated account statement against your PAN and read it. It takes ten minutes, it surfaces folios you have forgotten, and it is the only routine check that covers mutual funds and demat holdings together.

Insurance has the most decentralised search of the four. Rather than a single register, the IRDAI requires insurers to publish their own unclaimed amounts and routes policyholders to them through its Bima Bharosa portal, which lists life, general and health insurers with a link to each company's own unclaimed amount search. If you know the insurer, that is the fastest path: go to the list, find the company, search its facility.

If you do not know the insurer, Bima Bharosa carries a query form that pushes the question outwards for you. You supply the policyholder's name, mobile number, date of birth, PIN code, district and state, and the policy numbers if you have them, and you may nominate up to five insurance companies at a time; PAN and email are optional. The submission is validated by a one-time password to the mobile number, and you consent to your details being shared with the insurers named so they can identify unclaimed amounts against you. Multiple policy numbers for the same insurer are entered separated by commas.

Unclaimed insurance money is not only maturity proceeds. Survival benefits that were never encashed, refunded premiums, and death claims where the nominee was never told the policy existed all sit in the same category. A policy the family never knew about is a common finding when an estate is reconstructed, which is why the insurer-by-insurer sweep is worth doing even when nobody remembers a policy.

The IRDAI's grievance call centre, on 155255 or 1800 425 4732, takes policyholder queries in Hindi, English and other major Indian languages between 8am and 8pm from Monday to Saturday, and the escalation ladder runs from the insurer's grievance redressal officer to the IRDAI and then to the Insurance Ombudsman. If the insurer's own search shows an amount and the insurer will not pay it, that ladder is the route, and our guide on a rejected insurance claim covers how to build the file.

Provident fund and small savings sit outside all four registers and need their own enquiries. An EPF balance is traced through the member's universal account number with the Employees' Provident Fund Organisation, which our guides on withdrawing and transferring EPF deal with at length. Public Provident Fund, National Savings Certificates, Kisan Vikas Patra, the Senior Citizen Savings Scheme, Sukanya Samriddhi and the post office savings account are administered through post offices and designated banks under the National Savings Institute, whose site carries the scheme rules, the current interest rates and a grievance mechanism with complaint tracking.

For anything held at a post office, India Post's customer care line on 1800 266 6868 is the starting point, and India Post lists the Senior Citizen Welfare Fund among its banking services — the destination for certain small savings balances that go unclaimed. As with the banks, the account is normally revived rather than claimed, and the passbook, however old, makes the enquiry dramatically shorter.

None of these bodies searches on your behalf across the others. There is no single Indian register of a person's financial life, and no portal that returns everything against a PAN. The sweep has to be done one system at a time.

Wherever there is a public register of money whose owner is not looking, an industry appears to look on their behalf. Some of it is honest paperwork help. A good deal of it is a fee charged for filling in a free government form, and a portion of it is straightforward fraud built on a register that anyone can read.

Start from the cost of doing it yourself, which is the number every offer should be measured against. Reactivating an inoperative bank account is free by regulatory instruction. Searching UDGAM is free. Filing IEPF-5 is done on a government portal. Searching Bima Bharosa is free. The Reserve Bank's ombudsman scheme and the insurance and securities grievance systems are free to the complainant. There is no stage in a genuine claim at which a private intermediary is required.

The regulators have said so in terms. The IEPF Authority's guidance states that it does not support any middleman, broker or agent for refund claims and that engaging one can lead to discrepancies or rejection. The IRDAI's Bima Bharosa pages carry an unusually blunt warning that the portal never asks for payments of any kind from policyholders or complainants, and tell users not to scan QR codes or follow links that claim to process a disbursement, and to watch for fraudulent sites imitating the official domain.

The characteristic frauds follow from the design of the registers. Because banks must publish their unclaimed deposits with the holder's name and address, and because IEPF data is public, a caller can open with your real name, a real amount and a real institution — the details that normally establish that a caller is genuine. What follows is a request for a processing fee, a share of the recovery, a one-time password, or a signature on a general power of attorney. All four are the fraud. The register the caller is reading from is one you can read yourself.

Be equally careful with the legitimate end of the market. Where a claim is genuinely complex — an estate with several heirs, a company that has merged twice, physical certificates in a maiden name — a company secretary or an advocate is a reasonable expense, and a professional will charge a fee for their time. What they should not have is an open-ended mandate to receive your money. Payment on any genuine claim is made by the institution to the claimant's own verified bank account, and any structure that routes the proceeds through an intermediary's account should end the conversation.

If you have already paid someone, or handed over documents to a caller, treat it as fraud rather than a bad purchase: report it through the national cybercrime channels covered in our guide to reporting cyber fraud, tell the institution concerned so the claim can be flagged, and file the claim yourself in parallel. The register does not care who asks; it is your entitlement, and asking again costs nothing.