The Reserve Bank of India is proposing to expand the Consolidated Account Statement (CAS) — currently used for mutual funds and shares — to include fixed deposits and bank deposit accounts. This move would give investors a single unified statement showing all their financial holdings across banks and capital market instruments. Currently, CAS is issued by depositories like CDSL and NSDL for securities. The RBI's extension aims to improve financial transparency and help investors track dormant or forgotten deposits.

The Consolidated Account Statement (CAS) is a periodic statement that aggregates an investor's holdings across multiple financial instruments and institutions into one document. It was introduced by SEBI for the capital markets segment, where depositories CDSL and NSDL issue a monthly CAS to investors holding mutual fund units and demat securities. The PAN (Permanent Account Number) is the common identifier that links all these holdings.

Currently, bank fixed deposits sit outside this framework — a depositor with FDs in five different banks receives five separate statements, making it easy to lose track of deposits. Unclaimed deposits in Indian banks have been a persistent regulatory concern; the RBI's Depositor Education and Awareness (DEA) Fund holds thousands of crores from unclaimed accounts.

By proposing to bring FDs and bank deposits under CAS, RBI aims to create a unified financial snapshot. This mirrors the broader regulatory trend toward financial data interoperability — seen also in the Account Aggregator (AA) framework under NBFC-AA regulations, which allows consent-based financial data sharing across banks, insurers, and mutual funds.

For the exam, the key conceptual distinction is regulatory jurisdiction: SEBI oversees CAS for capital market instruments (MFs, equities, ETFs) through depositories, while RBI governs the banking side (FDs, savings deposits). The proposed expansion would require coordination between both regulators, making it a cross-regulatory initiative. The DEA Fund, unclaimed deposit norms, and the Account Aggregator ecosystem are all closely related concepts that examiners in this domain routinely test.