HDFC NRI Experiences in dealing with account changes upon demise of a holder.

The primary intent of this blog is to help others with have a similar situation as ours. Secondary intent is for HDFC management to fix their business processes and train their personnel to deliver an exceptional customer experience. I have not mentioned any names to protect privacy of the people involved.

Our father passed away on June 10th 2020. My brother and I came down from USA to help our mom sort things out. One of the major tasks we had to deal with was HDFC bank and  securities. 

My mom is a US citizen, residing in India with an oversees citizen of India (OCI) and my dad was an Indian citizen. Both have been living in India for the last 5 years and have joint holdings in HDFC Savings Account as well as HDFC Securities/Demat accounts. Upon his death, she decided to move back to the US with us. Here in lies the complication. All her accounts have be converted to NRO, delete his name from the joint accounts, move his holdings into her accounts both for savings and demat accounts. 

June 24th: We met a lady from HDFC securities branch in Bangalore with the death certificate. She advised us to open a new single holder DEMAT account so that all the holdings could be transferred to the Demat account and then they could close the joint accounts. We were then put in touch with another gentleman at the PIS (Portfolio Investment Scheme) office, who advised us to open a new 3 in 1 NRO  DEMAT, PIS & Trading account. He confidently assured us to convert my mom's savings account to NRO as a pre-requisite to the processing the 3-in-1 accounts. We trusted his guidance

June 25th: We went to our local HDFC branch and were put in touch with a relationship manager.  This nice young gentleman very new to the job has had no training or knowledge on dealing with NRI cases like ours. He took a day for him to respond to our queries on process as he had to ask his superiors. It took about about 2 weeks before we were given the exact process/steps/forms to fill that too after we escalated to the branch manager. The process was as follows:

1. Delete dad's (deceased) name from joint accounts
2. Consolidate all accounts under single customer ID (mom's) 
3. Send this customer ID to HDFC Chennai office for NRO conversion. Each step has a different form. We filled all the forms, went to the bank branch about 10 times to make sure progress is being made. The name deletion happened fairly quickly. Step 2 and 3 was taking time for some unknown reason. One of the lessons learnt is that unless you show up or call them, they will not tell you if progress is being made or, there is a roadblock. Upon escalation, the local bank manager personally made sure she completed all tasks at her back.

July 23rd:

Now that Savings account was an NRO account, we reached out to the HDFC Securities contact to proceed with the converting resident demat accounts into NRO demat account. 

Recall that the gentleman at the PIS (Portfolio Investment Scheme) office had advised us to open a new 3 in 1 NRO  DEMAT, PIS & Trading account. We duely submitted the forms.

July 27th:  

We called to check on the progress. Only when we called, we were told the process is wrong! 
Sigh! We are now stuck in a loop! 

In short, our challenge is as follows;

• If we have a joint resident Demat account with one holder deceased you can't convert the account to NRO. 
• We cannot open a new NRO account if the individual has a resident Demat account. 
• We cannot open a resident Demat account as the savings account has been converted to NRO

What now?

July 29th:

We used some influence to escalate the matter to the senior manager of the PIS office. 

He suggested that we write an exception request to proceed with the processing our 3in1 forms. This department is in Bombay. Once again, we were confidently assured that this will be processed soon.

Aug 3rd: No one called us. When we called to check and once again assured that by close of business day all will be done. End of business day? At 6 pm, we were told one signature was missing and we scrambled to get mom's signature and re-submit it.

Aug 4: No update. it is stuck at the Bombay office.