In a bid to ease the onboarding process for Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) and avoid duplication of information, the capital markets regulator on Tuesday proposed a simplified version of the Common Application Form (CAF), requiring only information unique to the applicant.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) said that in the case of certain categories of FPI applicants, some relevant information is already captured in the depositories’ common application form (CAF) module, which can be leveraged without requiring the seeking it from the applicants again.
SEBI said that the information that is already in the depositories’ CAF module accounts for up to 45% of the number of fields present, and the rest is unique information.
These FPI categories include multiple funds under an Investment Manager (IM), sub-funds of a master fund, sub-funds of a fund with a segregated portfolio, or schemes of insurance companies, wherein one of the funds or schemes is already a registered FPI.
“There has been feedback that an abridged version of CAF, having only those fields which are unique to the aforesaid applicants, shall help save significant time and efforts in terms of reviewing the application and signing a reduced number of pages,” the regulator said, inviting public comments by October 15.
However, there are certain fields which are exclusive to individual FPI applicants and hence will not be applicable to the applicants belonging to the specified categories.
The rest of the information will be auto-filled from the depository’s records or certain fields will be disabled if not needed. Also, the applicants will need to confirm that the previously provided information remains unchanged, the draft paper said.
“While leveraging on the available information, an explicit consent to use the available information and confirmation that all the details other than those mentioned in the abridged version of CAF remain unchanged, shall be obtained from the applicant,” SEBI said.
After receiving the required information from applicants, custodians will be responsible for updating the CAF details against the registration number of each applicant. This will ensure that the depository system reflects complete and accurate information, whether filled in by the applicants or auto-populated.