Prashanta Banerjee, a 74-year-old retiree, lives alone in Calcutta. His only son lives abroad, while his wife passed away three years ago. Since then, Banerjee has tried to find ways to look keep himself busy, and has found some joy in trading in shares.

After setting up his demat account with a brokerage firm, or his depository participant (DP), Banerjee decided to get the shares he already owned dematted as well, so that they could be credited to his account and allow him to trade in them. What he didn’t reckon with was how irksome the process could be.

“I was vaguely aware of what dematerialising was, but I had no idea what it actually involved, or how I had to go about doing it. My financial planner told me that the process usually takes anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. I got the ‘few months’ treatment, because the company kept rejecting my demat application, saying that my signature did not match their records. The whole process took four and a half months.”

Usually, the actual process of dematting shares isn’t all that complicated. But if you run into even the tiniest of snags, the entire procedure can stretch on for months on end. This is particularly true in the case of senior citizens. The biggest hurdle they face is that because of their advanced age, their current signatures often do not tally with the specimen signatures provided in the physical, paper shares that they had bought perhaps decades ago.

A spokesperson for HDFC Bank points out that this is probably the single biggest cause of rejected applications in the case of elderly people. “The most common difficulty faced by senior citizens while trying to demat their shares are rejections by the issuer of these shares, or their registrar and transfer agent, owing to a mismatch of signatures,” he says.

Asha Sharma, an 84-year-old Calcutta resident, would agree. Sharma had tried to demat her shares a few years ago, and says it was a lot more trouble than she had expected. “At first, the company whose shares I owned wouldn’t accept my signature. So I had to get my signature attested by the bank and send it back to the company. But the company rejected my demat application again, and I had to start the process all over again. Although they approved it the third time, the whole process stretched on for many months.”

To get your shares dematted, you need to get your current signature approved by the company. For this you have to send in your proof of residence, a photocopy of your voter ID card, PAN card, passport, or a similar ID. You would also need a letter from your bank manager attesting your signature.

Furthermore, you are required to obtain another letter from your bank manager, stating when you opened your bank account and whether the account is alive or dormant. The letter should contain the bank manager’s signature, code and phone number. You would also sometimes need to get an affidavit on a Rs 100 stamp paper, stating that this particular signature is the one that you use now and this too has to be attested by the bank manager.

A spokesperson for Karvy Computershare Private Limited, a financial services firm that manages the dematting of shares for the Reliance group, says that while he recognises the difficulty that many shareholders go through, the company itself has no alternative but to be this stringent.

“Our company can only follow the guidelines laid down by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and those set by the company itself. Our demat department has a database of signatures of whoever has invested with us. If the signature on the demat application form does not tally with the one on our database, we reject the application.”

The problem can get worse for senior citizens who, owing to medical problems, are unable to sign their names legibly. But Surya Bhatia, a certified financial planner based in Delhi, says there is a way around this. “If the person is unable to sign his name because of a medical condition, there is the option of using a thumbprint. The procedure to get a thumbprint attested is the same as that of getting a signature attested. You also have to provide a doctor’s certificate verifying that the shareholder is unable to sign his or her name,” says Bhatia.

The Karvy spokesperson adds that the doctor’s certificate too needs to be attested by a government medical facility. Certificates from private clinics and hospitals do not count.

But for elderly investors like Sharma, the whole process seems much too lengthy and complex. While she appreciates the company’s diligence in getting shareholders’ signatures authenticated, she still feels that the dematting of shares need not be this long drawn out. And, as she points out, if you are an elderly person with limited mobility, and with no one to do all the running around to get letters and documents attested, then you will simply give up trying to get your shares dematted.

The problem takes another turn when it comes to dematting the shares of a person who has died. If the shares were held jointly by the deceased and his or her heir, or the shareholder had named a nominee, the process becomes relatively easy. In the first case, the joint holder has to produce a death certificate of the deceased shareholder, and then the shares are transferred entirely to him or her, who can then proceed to demat the shares.

In the second case, the company will, on the shareholder’s death, transfer the shares to the nominee. (Most DPs have, in fact, made it mandatory to nominate an inheritor while setting up an account to avoid future complications.)

But, if there is no named nominee, and if the shares were held singly, things can get very messy indeed. In this case, the claimant would have to get a probate from the court, stating that he is the rightful inheritor of the shares. “The process can take anywhere from a few months to even a year or two,” says Bhatia. “And it is so complicated that even lawyers and professionals who know how to navigate the system are more or less helpless to expedite matters.”

To come back to the problems faced by senior citizens, many ask why companies do not make things a tad easier for those who want to get their shares dematted. But experts say that the checks and double checks are unavoidable. Bijay Mumuria, director of Sumedha Fiscal Services Limited, a financial services company in Calcutta, says that there’s good reason on the part of companies to be so careful.

“Risk and convenience need to be balanced out. Ownership of the shares has to be established, and a company will naturally be strict when it comes to verifying signatures. The open market is very susceptible to fraud and manipulation. These strict measures help ensure that chances of malpractices are minimised.”

That may be scant comfort to the old and the infirm.