#8 All about RBI's Retail Direct Gilt

- May 28, 2024

RBI in its press relase today has formally launched the mobile apps for its Retail Direct portal and NDS-OM portal

Andriod App Links: https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=CCIL



Retail Direct Gilt (RDG) Account

RBI has lauched Retail Direct portal to make government securities (G-secs), treasury bills (T-Bills), state development loans (SDLs) sovereign gold bonds (SGBs) easily available to retail investors in multiples of just ₹10,000/-(for securities) and 1gm (for SGBs).

  • G-secs/SDLs/T-bills in short are loans taken by governments for their schemes and operations and have the sovereign guarantee from RBI.

  • Floating Rate Savings Bonds 2020 can also be purchased through RDG portal. FRSB are taxable bonds, have a lock in of 8 years and pay interest every 6 months @ 0.35% more than the prevailing NSC( National Savings Certificate ) interest rate.

  • If you have already invested in sovereign gold bonds(SGBs) through banks/post offcies in non-demat form, they are held in BLA (Bond Ledger Account) maintained by RBI. These will be transferred to RDG account within one month of account creation on the RDG portal.

  • RDG also provides the facility of gifting securties to other RDG users. Sender has to initiate gift, receiver should accept, a form will be sent by mail and will be asked to be filled by sender after receiver’s acceptance.

Why Treasury bills?

Yields of T-bills in the recent times have spiked with the increase in interest rates by RBI. T-bills are availble in 91,182,364 day tenures.

91-day t-bills are currently yielding ~7% per annum yield, which is much better that SB interest rate of ~2-3%, with just 91-day lock in.

T-bill Yields from Jan 2023 - till date can be found here

NDS-OM ( Negotiated Dealing System - Order Matching)

While RDG portal is mainly for primary market auction, NDS-OM platform is for secondary market trades.

  • The Odd Lot segment of NDS, specially designed for retail investors, allows trades in the units of ₹10,000/- or 1gm
  • Odd Lot Market Watch gives the list of active bids in the odd lot market
  • T-bills maturing in less than 91 days can also be found trading on NDS and gives opportunity to park surplus for less than 3 months at yields better than SB interest rates
  • SGBs also trade on this platform, sometimes provide good buying opportunity for long term investors in gold

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