This Indian startup helps recover unclaimed investments made by even your grandparents

Delhi-based GLC Wealth was founded in 2017 to explore the space of wealth recovery, a year after the government set up the Investor Education Protection Fund Authority (IEPFA). Simply put, the company helps people recover their unclaimed/forgotten investments lying the form of shares, and dividends. Shares worth over Rs 50,000 crore are lying unclaimed with the IEPF, according to the company website.

Aquil Busrai is a Certified Executive Coach and a leadership development Guru, who has four decades of HR experience with blue chip organisations like Unilever in Kenya and India, Motorola in Asia Pacific, Shell in Malaysia, and IBM in India. He was allotted shares of multiple companies while he was working with them over his long corporate tenure. Since all the old ESOPs were in physical certificate form, Busrai had lost track of his huge unclaimed investments. He approached GLC Wealth for help and the company helped him transfer multiple crores-worth shares into the demat accounts of Busrai and his wife, and also assisted in the release of dividends worth lakhs into his bank account.

In conversation with Republic, GLC Wealth co-founder Sanchit Garg said, "While helping several families with their inheritance and succession-related issues, the company strived for a wide unexplored space where huge amounts of investments in financial securities, primarily physical share certificates and dormant demat accounts were lying unclaimed."

"Further research also indicated that a lot of investors and families did not keep track of their investments in the early 1960s to 1990s; they used to invest in physical securities and then forgot about it. Many of these investors have passed away, and their families are unaware of their investments; some families have settled abroad permanently and many have lost the documents to claim back such investments," he added.

Major challenge: Winning clients' trust

The advancement in technology has only increased the number of cyber frauds. And very often, it's the older generation that becomes victims of such frauds. The Reserve Bank of India and other state-private lenders repeatedly ask citizens to not share confidential banking details over the phone. In such a scenario, people get suspicious when the company makes the first approach to help people recover their forgotten investments.

"Building trust with the prospective clients is a challenging part of our work. Initially, since this idea was very new to the people in India, we faced issues related to trust and overcoming their apprehensions about the possibility of fraud. However, we overcame this challenge pretty quickly given the excellent credentials of the company founders. With time as we started building a client base of very prominent personalities and reputed businessmen, CEOs, people from the corporate world, promoters of listed companies, royal families, and more, they started becoming our brand ambassadors," Garg said.

The recovery of unclaimed assets requires a lot of coordination with multiple parties involved in the process like the secretarial and investor relations departments of publicly listed companies, their registrars, government and public authorities.

"Building a network of right professionals and a working relationship with these parties was a difficult task. However, our in-depth legal knowledge about the India regulations, and our professionalism helped us bridge this gap as well in no time, he added.

GLC Wealth has a total book of assets under recovery worth approximately Rs 500 crores spread over 1000 folios. Investments worth over Rs 150 crores have already been recovered, according to Sanchit Garg.

Companies such as Share Samadhan, Muds Management, Recoversy, and Asset Tracers are some of the competitors of GLC Wealth in India.