Need to improve credibility of market institutions: Jaitley

The government on Saturday called for improving the image of market institutions to broaden capital market participation and encourage households to invest more in debt and equity instruments.

"We need to improve the credibility and integrity of our market institutions, the regulators, corporates to attract more retail funds into the market," Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said at an industry event here.

"Though, we have covered a reasonable distance over the past decades in terms of financial market development, there is still a long way to go."

Jaitley was speaking at an event here to celebrate the National Securities Depository's (NSDL) achievement of crossing Rs.100 lakh crore custody value of securities held in its demat accounts.

Currently, the NSDL holds securities worth Rs.115 lakh crore. This value is greater than the total aggregate deposits across banks in India.

The NSDL holds more than 89 percent of the securities in dematerialised mode in the country.

The NSDL now services more than 14 million investor accounts through its participants in more than 18,400 locations in 1,748 cities and towns in the country, making it one of the largest depositories in the world in terms of number of demat accounts.

Besides the basic demat related services, NSDL offers value added services to investors and is contributing to the 'Digital India' drive through various internet and mobile-based initiatives like SPEED-e, IDeAS, STeADY, SPICE, SIMPLE, e-voting, venue voting, Mobile Application, etc.

It has also started sending consolidated account statements with details of investments across demat accounts, mutual funds and insurance policies in electronic format.

This is part of the overall path breaking vision to enable all financial assets to be held electronically in a single demat account, articulated by Jaitley in his budget speech of July 2014.