OSV

A notifier reports that an investor has died. The intermediary cannot just take the death certificate at face value. It must be verified. The workbook gives two routes. One is online, checked against the issuing government authority's website. The other is offline, a process it calls OSV — Original Seen and Verified.

OSV means exactly what its name says. Someone at the intermediary has physically seen the original document and verified it. This is different from matching it electronically against a government database.

From Chapter 6, section 6.3.5: on receiving the notifier's intimation of an investor's death along with the death certificate and PAN, the intermediary must verify the death certificate within one day of receipt, by one of two modes:

1. Online — through the website of the issuing government authority; or
2. Offline — the OSV (Original Seen and Verified) process carried out by the intermediary itself.

The workbook does not set out separate sub-steps for how OSV is physically conducted beyond naming it as the offline verification route; it treats OSV as the fallback method whenever an online check against a government portal is not available.

An intermediary receives a death certificate from a notifier on 4 April for an investor who died in a small town where the certificate was issued by a local municipal authority whose records are not available on a searchable government website.

Unable to verify the certificate online, the intermediary instead uses the OSV process: an authorised official physically examines the original death certificate, confirms it appears genuine and complete, and records that it has been "seen and verified" by 5 April — completing the verification within the required 1 day of receiving it, just as an online check would have.

Chapter 6, section 6.3.5, names OSV as the offline alternative to online verification of a death certificate, within the one-day verification window under the centralized demise-reporting mechanism. Expect a question naming OSV as the offline route, contrasted with online verification through the issuing authority's website.

• OSV is the offline route; the online route is verification through the issuing government authority's website — the workbook gives exactly these two options, not more.
• The one-day verification window applies regardless of which of the two routes is used.
• OSV is carried out by the intermediary, not by the notifier or the KRA.