Created on 3rd November 2024
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In India, there’s a staggering ₹78,200 crore lying unclaimed with the RBI, with comparable amounts locked in insurance, mutual funds, and EPFs. The root causes are structural: missing nominee details, complex claim procedures, no unified asset tracking system, and largely manual processes due to limited digital infrastructure.On top of that, the repetitive KYC and form-filling requirements every time we open a new account adds to the burden, that most people just skip what is not mandatory. The lack of digital infrastructure to rectify such records, adds a layer to the problem.
The impact of this is significant. Families are losing rightful access to their inheritance, and a massive amount of economic value is locked in these unclaimed assets. Financial institutions face an operational burden, and a lot of time and resources are wasted in processing claims. This also adds emotional stress during already difficult times. Clearly, there’s an urgent need for streamlined processes and better digital infrastructure to ensure that rightful heirs can access their assets without unnecessary hurdles.
Once a user signs up, we not only centralise all their assets, and build their family tree, but provide a single click process to update their nominee details with the respective financial institutions.
Not only that. If our customers require additional financial services, they needn't waste time filling form. Opting for the single sign on option, embedded as a service on the Financial institute/fintech app, will ensure complete information in order for our customers to get started, and focus on their actual needs.
Down the line, as the ecosystem matures, we will also scale to ensure that if there any untoward incidents, the next of kin, basis the users family tree, are notified to take action wherever they are a nominee. This is just the beginning. Imagine using ZK proofs to verify and validate your financial status, having a consolidated view of all your data consents.
When we started out, we wanted to use Meta's user profile APIs, and build out the users family tree. However we realised not everyone adds their actual family members, nor are they always hoenst about their relationships. So while a single signon with Meta would have made the onbaording easier, we went ahead with apisetu.gov.in APIs.
However, when it comes to government data, only certain states are actually ready with JSON format data. Also since we are a group of individuals, for us to get access to the apiSetu playground was an issue. We had to rely onthe publicly available APIs structures in order to build our prototype. Same with getting access to the private hosted APIs like Fixerra PIS or MFcentral.
So ultimately we had to resort to givign users the ability to "add family members" and hope that users would be ok sharing names and ID proofs of their family members with us. We are hopeful that in the future this won;t be an issue as the government focuses on building out more robust API structures.
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