Mutual funds are not only finding trading in demat shares far more easier and simpler they are also saving significant amount of funds owing to lower charges in the depository environment.

A total of Rs 4 crore has already been saved by mutual funds of which Rs 2 crore has been saved by UTI alone. According to SEBI sources, JM Mutual Fund has saved Rs 10 lakh, Prudential ICICI Mutual Fund Rs 15 lakh, Indbank Mutual Fund Rs 10 lakh , Canbank Mutual Fund Rs 35 lakh and Tata Mutual Fund Rs 15 lakh.

These savings had been achieved due to reducedtransaction costs, reduced custodial charges, lower brokerage fees, no stamp duties, reduced paper work, lesser bad deliveries and faster and speedy transactions.

The mutual fund industry would end up having attained much higher levels of dematerialisation and higher savings before the end of fiscal, said an industry player by when they would be dematerialising a large part of their portfolio and trading more and more in demat shares of a larger number of companies.

With mandatory demat trading for all investors set to bring the much needed liquidity, there is bound to be higher levels of trading activity in demat shares.

UTI which manages a corpus in excess of Rs 72,000 crore for instance has already dematerialised more than 77 per cent of its portfolio in those scrips which are available for dematerialisation.

According to SEBI sources, the mutual funds who have already attained more than 80 per cent dematerialisation of their portfolio are JM Mutual Fund at 95 per cent, Templeton at 90 per cent andTata Mutual Fund at 83 per cent.Mutual funds that have attained more than 50 per cent but less than 80 per cent dematerialisation levels are Unit Trust of India (UTI) at 77 per cent, Alliance Mutual Fund at 75 per cent, Birla Mutual Fund at 65 per cent, Prudential ICICI Mutual Fund at 65 per cent, Jardine Fleming Mutual Fund at 63 per cent, Canbank Mutual Fund at 62 per cent and Bank of India Mutual Fund at 59 per cent.

Mutual funds that have attained below 50 per cent dematerialisation are GIC Mutual Fund at 55 per cent, PNB Mutual Fund at 50 per cent, DSP Merrill Lynch Mutual Fund at 50 per cent, Indbank Mutual Fund at 40 per cent, Reliance Mutual Fund at 40 per cent, Bank of Baroda Mutual Fund at 45 per cent, Sun F&C Mutual Fund at 45 per cent, IDBI Mutual Fund at 45 per cent and State Bank of India (SBI) Mutual Fund at 35 per cent.