Aadhaar mandatory to file income tax returns

INSURANCE

The insurance regulator, in a circular last month, asked insurers to not make Form 60, Aadhaar and PAN card mandatory for the policy holder as part of the know your customer (KYC) process. However, an insurer can accept Aadhaar as an identity document: if you voluntarily offer your Aadhaar card, if insurers ensure that the first eight digits of the Aadhaar number are appropriately masked and at no point can more than four digits of the Aadhaar number be stored by insurers in physical or digital form. Insurers are also not allowed to authenticate using the E-KYC facility or the yes/no authentication facility of ULDAL. “The regulator has taken cognisance of the Supreme Court judgement which will benefit the insured. It has been ensured that the safety of data is not compromised and storage of data does not harm the customers,” said Anup Rau, chief executive officer of Edelweiss General Insurance. MUTUAL FUNDS

With mutual funds too, usage of Aadhaar is not mandatory. “There were two ways in which the mutual fund industry was impacted by the Aadhaar regulations. One was not being able to do E-KYC using Aadhaar OTP feature,” said Srikanth Meenakshi, co-founder and chief operating officer, Fundsindia.com. Earlier you could complete your KYC process online by initiating a one-time password (OTP) on your mobile phone linked to your Aadhaar card. “UIDAI and NPCI have said that private entities cannot have access to the UIDAI data which meant that we had to scrap the E-KYC process. It was a big blow to the industry,” said Meenakshi.

“Now the investor has to do KYC over a video call which becomes cumbersome for the investor,” said Meenakshi. The second way in which the industry was affected was the stop in the e-signature mandate, he added.