National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) has clarified that e-sign based e-mandates generated on or before 26 September 2018 would be valid till February 15, 2019. In order to keep the SIPs live, the industry has to convert those e-mandates in to physical ones before the due date.
To avoid discontinuation of SIPs, fund houses and registrar and transfer agents have sprung into action to convert the e-sign-based mandates to physical mandates.
For instance, Karvy has started several activities from October 2018 to support investors and distributors to achieve this changeover. It has created an online tool to change to physical mandates and shared emails with prefilled forms for remediation. Similarly, CAMS has sent pre-filled mandates to investors. Investors need to sign the form, take a picture and send it to response@camsonline.com. A CAMS official said that they have started receiving signed mandates from investors and only about 1,000 mandates have to be remediated.
Ravikumar Somasi of Karvy Fintech said that they have seen decent conversion from e-mandates to physical mode. To help other investors who are yet to submit physical mandates, Karvy is running digital campaigns with distributors and sending emails to target investors nudging them to comply with the rules at the earliest.
