To ensure that enough investors have opened accounts before they start receiving demat deliveries, stock exchanges had decided to accord first priority to distributing demat shares received in delivery to institutions.

If there are any shares left after all the institutions have been taken care off, they are delivered to individual shareholders. Till now, there were very few investors who ended up having to receive demat shares. But with the tide changing over the past few days and the list of securities (where institutions are required to sell in demat form) being extended by another 22 securities from June 1, more and more demat sharesare being sold by institutions.

As institutions have not been heavy buyers, receiving demat shares has also come down to a trickle over the past fortnight. Bulk of the shares hence being delivered in demat form are now being credited to individual investors, several of whom, have not yet opened depository accounts.

As a result, brokers and depository participants are asking their clients to immediately open depository accounts. "In the settlement just concluded, 75 of my clients have received demat delivery against their purchases. Of these only about 45 have depository accounts. We have asked the rest to immediately open accounts," said C George, managing director of Geojit Securities. While investors had been given the option to rematerialise the demat shares received by them by paying the fee for the same, if they did not want to accept the demat shares, there are few who would want to do that, as the merits of demat trading have been well understood. The April 6 move of bringing in a unified segmenthas proved to be a runaway success and the percentage of demat shares being delivered has touched levels of 12-14 per cent at the two leading stock exchanges.