The power of CAS and your Email ID in your Mutual Fund Investments

What is the way to have a single view of all your mutual fund investments (portfolio as well as details), since inception?

Your likely answers are:

• Get statements from individual fund houses and add them in an excel sheet or word document.
• Ask your distributor to give you the statements
• Download the CAS from NSDL or CAMS or Karvy

That’s great.

But to ensure that you receive complete information about your investments, it is important that you do ONE most important thing.

Ensure that your Email id is updated in all your investments at all times.

We have seen several cases so far where the email id and contact number have been missing from folio information of mutual funds. This causes serious issues with respect to tracking of investments.

The basis for this feature to work is the Consolidated Account Statement (CAS) from CAMS. Now the CAS works only with an email id.

As long as you have your email id registered with your funds, the information will be mailed back to your email.

Recently, a few users found to their surprise that the CAS did not show all their holdings and transactions in mutual funds.

What was discovered that the email id was not mapped at all or it was an old email id, typically an official one. As you changed jobs, you forgot to update your email.

Tip: Never ever give your official id as contact for communication. Your email should be preferably a personal one that you will have lifelong access to.

Sometimes, the data input teams at the registrars and the AMCs also make mistakes where the email id is wrongly input. Yes, a Yahoo id can appear as a Gmail id and vice versa. Numbers and alphabets can go missing too.

How to update your contact details – email id, mobile number – in your Mutual Funds?

Well, whatever the reason for the email id not mapped, it becomes an uphill task for you to make the corrections. More so because some Mutual Funds still insist on paper applications. God knows which world they are living in!

Thankfully, in recent times, several AMCs have started friendly initiatives, that too online and on phone, to allow investors to change/update their contact details themselves.

With fund houses such as HDFC, Reliance, ICICI, DSP, Quantum, Canara Robeco, SBI, etc, you can update your contact details, that is your email id and mobile number online.

Here are the links for some of the fund houses to  update details online.

• Franklin Templeton India
• ICICI Prudential MF
• Reliance MF
• HDFC MF
• DSP Blackrock MF

For other fund houses such as TATA, Sundaram, L&T, etc., you can call their customer service and place an update request. The toll free numbers can be located on their websites.

CAMS, the registrar has a wonderful facility where it allows PAN based updation of contact details. There is a simple one page form that you can fill and submit at one of its offices.

Click here to download the CAMS’ PAN Based contact details change form

For the specified PAN, the details are updated across AMCs serviced by CAMS. That by itself is a very large number. In one shot, several funds will have your updated details.

Karvy, the other multi fund registrar still doesn’t have such a facility. So, your only choice is either do it online with the Fund House or submit a paper application.

Now, you can have a question. “What if I don’t know what my mutual fund holdings are?”
This is quite a possibility.

One of the ways that to solve this issue is to apply for a CAN or a Common Account Number. A CAN is a unique number issues by MF Utilities for a particular holding type. Once a CAN is created, it will map and provide your all the folios. The only issue is that you will have to create as many CANs as your holding types.

Take control of your investments with your Email ID and your CAS

As you would realise, your email id is the most important weapon to help you control your mutual fund investments. Once it is mapped to all your holdings, you will be able to periodically download the CAS and monitor the progress and status of your portfolio.

The bottomline is keep your contact details updated at all times. This includes your Banks, Mutual Funds, Demat and other Small Savings accounts.

You are the biggest beneficiary of this step.