Ok! Here we go..
First thing we need is a bank to do trading. The most popular banks seem to be SBI, ICICI and HDFC. There are other banks like ABN-Amro that do provide NRI services but I couldnt get any information from their site regarding trading options.
SBI : State Bank of India.
I always liked State Bank of India for no particular reason. It could be because it is a government operated bank and I had an account in it since my undergraduate days. So I first started looking for information from SBI. Unfortunately I could not find any such information. All I could find is that you can open an account with them as NRE Rupee Account or Savings account etc. The rules for being an NRI are pretty simple. Here is what the definition is:
"A Non Resident Indian (NRI) as per FEMA 1999 is an Indian citizen or Foreign National of Indian Origin resident outside India for purposes of employment, carrying on business or vocation in circumstances as would indicate an intention to stay outside India for an indefinite period.An individual will also be considered NRI if his stay in
There is an SBI branch in San Diego. I thought may be I can call them up and find more information. I spoke to the representative and also the manager. The manager mentioned that I need to get an account directly with the branch in India and that these guys don't have any ties with them. ( huh? thought they are part of the same bank? ). Hence I had to call a "pass" on this bank. As expected their website is not all that great. It doesn't give much information on how we can invest in stocks or mutual funds from their bank. So I had to move on.
ICICI:
The second bank I liked is ICICI for the sole reason that is again an Indian bank. I believe ICICI n CItibank were at logger heads when I was India to gain the market. I badly wanted to take ICICI but I opted for Citibank for only two reasons. There was not ATM near my office and no ATM near my then home. So I started looking at their website, reading information but I could never find anything related to investing. They do have mutual funds which anyone can buy but the returns shown are meager. Good thing about ICICI is that they have live chat with some representative. I tried calling them and after couple of minutes (pretty fast huh?). I am not sure if there are real people on the other side or it is just a bot with a different name, but I chatted twice and both the times I got exact same answers, the same words. Either that, or they are given a set of question and answers and they just copy and paste the same. Anyway, they said due to RBI regulations they cannot let anyone NRI to do online trading. So I had to let it go and search for something else.
HDFC:
HDFC is the only bank where I could find some information about direct trading for NRIs. Apparently we need an NRE account to start off with and another thing called PIS called Portfolio Investment Scheme. Here we go, now I need to open NRE account. So I went to their website. Their website! I really think they need to redesign their website. The navigation and the coding is really bad. Anyone after a bit of research I got some forms to download, fill them and send them to their New York branch. Their forms were so damn confusing. They didnt have a help page to answer them. Anyhow I got the forms filled up (hope I filled them properly). I had to copy lot of stuff before I can send the whole application to their office. Two days after I sent the forms I get a mail from them asking me to respond to the email so that they can help me with the forms. Sweet! Cant they just put up a help page and be done with it? They can save so much of time by doing so and possibly cut down on some of the costs they incur in hiring few people.
So there you go! I am now waiting for the people to call me and let me know if my forms are correct and hoping that I would get my account opened.
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2 comments:
I suggest you to go through the post once and rectify the small mistakes in typing
This is great info to know.
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